Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned Kurdish leader, called on his militant group on Thursday to lay down its arms and dissolve as part of a new bid to end a four-decade long conflict that has claimed tens of thousands of lives.

The 75-year-old militant leader Abdullah Ocalan has spent a quarter of a century in jail after leading his Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) to take up arms against the Turkish state to fight for a Kurdish homeland.

Abdullah Ocalan’s appeal raised the prospect of an end to a conflict between Turkey and the PKK that since the 1980s has killed an estimated 40,000 people.