Turkish colonel held over suspected executions of PKK sympathizers

Mar 23, 2009, 17:00 GMT

Ankara - A serving colonel in Turkey's military police was on Monday taken into custody on suspicion of involvement in the extrajudicial executions of sympathizers of the rebel Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) in south-east Turkey in the 1990s, the NTV private television station reported.

Colonel Cemal Temizoz, head of the military police, or gendarmes, responsible for security in rural areas in the central Anatolia province of Kayseri was taken to the city of Diyarbakir for questioning over the deaths of scores of people.

The issue of the extrajudicial executions has been under the spotlight in Turkey over the last two weeks after prosecutors ordered the excavation of sites near the border with Iraq where an anonymous informer claimed the bodies people who were sympathizers of the Kurdish rebels had been dumped.

The excavations in Cizre and Silopi resulted in the exhumation of a number of human bones.

NTV reported that Temizoz had been based in the area between 1993 and 1996 when fighting between the PKK and the Turkish military was at its height.

The excavations and arrests of a number of locals in the past two weeks have led to new reports that a secret group within the gendarmes had encouraged members of Hezbollah, a hardline Turkish Islamic group which is not related to the Lebanese group of the same name, to target PKK sympathizers.

The organization was effectively closed down in 2000 after the discovery that the group had moved from killing alleged PKK sympathizers to moderate Islamists. After raids on various Hezbollah safe houses in Istanbul, and a shoot-out that left Hezbollah leader Huseyin Velioglu dead, police discovered the bodies of dozens of people tortured and murdered by the group.

The ongoing investigation into the so-called Ergenekon gang, a shadowy group of fiercely secular nationalists that allegedly planned to overthrow the moderate Islamic government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has again raised the issue of the secret group within the gendarmes.

The group, known as Jitem but whose existence has never been officially recognized, was established by retired General Veli Kucuk who prosecutors allege to have been a leading player in the the Ergenekon gang.