By DPA,
Ankara : Turkish investigators looking into reports that the bodies of several people murdered in the 1990s in south-east Turkey had been dumped into wells have discovered a human skull, Turkish media reported Monday.
Digging around several wells in the district of Silopi, investigators found human hair, clothes, a military cap and human bones.
Dozens of people went missing, presumably murdered, during the 1990s at the height of fighting between the separatist Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Turkish armed forces.
In recent weeks there have been reports that a secret group within the gendarmerie, a military police force responsible for security in rural areas, had murdered a number of people in the predominantly Kurdish-populated south-east and had dumped their bodies into wells on state-owned land.
The existence of the secret group, known as Jitem, has never been officially recognised. The alleged founder of Jitem, retired General Veli Kucuk, has been arrested as part of a probe into the so-called Ergenekon gang, which prosecutors allege had plans to overthrow the moderate Islamic government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.