ANKARA, Turkey – The remains of four people believed killed in 1994 by Turkish soldiers have been found in a mass grave in a Kurdish village in Turkey’s southeast, after authorities were directed to the site by relatives of missing people.
The families of the missing had demanded excavation of the site, saying they believed their loved ones had been killed by Turkish soldiers and dumped in the grave. The digging was authorized by the prosecutor in the town of Cizre.
Relatives had named the missing men as Mehmet Ozkan and Mehmet Kaya, 60 and 56 respectively, Erif Ekin, 20, and Abdulselam Demir, 26. They said they were killed, together with three unidentified guerrillas of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), on June 4, 1994.
Relatives of the four were accompanied to the excavation site by lawyers, local representatives of several rights groups and the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP).
Relatives said that 16 bullets were found among the remains of Mehmet Ozkan and 18 in Mehmet Kaya’s hole-ridden clothing.
The remains are to be sent to Istanbul for forensic tests, and prosecutors decreed that the probe should remain confidential.
The Truth Justice Memory Center in Turkey, which aims to uncover past rights violations by the Turkish government, has issued several reports about the enforced disappearances and extrajudicial executions of Kurds.
In one report, the Center emphasized that, “The last half-century in Turkey was marked by widespread and grave human rights violations in the aftermath of military coups and rights violations centered on the Kurdish question.”
“Most of the forcibly disappeared people were buried as ‘unidentified persons,’ without any ‘records and reference numbers,’ and families were prevented from accessing the bodies,” it said.
IHD activists say they have been able to locate 253 mass graves in Kurdish cities and that there are allegedly well over 3,000 people in those mass graves waiting to be found.
