ANKARA, March 10 (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Turkey has condemned the decision of a Swiss court to impose a suspended jail sentence and a fine on a Turkish citizen for denying that mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915 amounted to genocide.

In the first such conviction under Swiss law, the court on Friday sentenced Dogu Perincek, head of the leftist-nationalist Turkish Workers' Party, to a 90-day suspended jail term and fined him 3,000 Swiss francs ($2,461).

"The court case was inappropriate, groundless and controversial in every sense ... The verdict cannot be accepted by the Turkish people," Turkey's Foreign Ministry said in a statement released late on Friday.

It criticised Swiss media coverage of the case, calling it biased, and said the verdict violated free speech.

Perincek, whose party has no seats in the Ankara parliament, was convicted under a 1995 Swiss law which bans denying, belittling or justifying any genocide. Twelve Turks were acquitted of similar charges in 2001.

Perincek, 65, said he would appeal against the verdict.

Turkey strongly denies claims by Armenia and its supporters that the Ottoman Empire committed a systematic genocide against about 1.5 million Armenians during World War One.

Ankara says that figure is greatly exaggerated. It says large numbers of both Christian Armenians and Muslim Turks died because of inter-ethnic fighting, famine and disease as the Ottoman Empire collapsed.

But many parliaments around the world have now recognised the Armenian killings as genocide.

The Swiss verdict coincides with Turkish diplomatic efforts to head off a resolution in the US Congress on the genocide.

bdnews24.com/amt/1945 hrs.