5 held in suspected grave probe

Hurriyet Daily News with wires

The detained included two sons of the former mayor of the town of Cizre as well as three residents of a village nearby where nearly 20 bone fragments were unearthed Monday, the source told the Agence France-Presse. The police are trying to find the former mayor of Cizre.

The arrests were the first in the investigation that began in February after newspapers published claims that several people who went missing in the 1990s at the height of deadly fighting between the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, and the army, were in fact executed by security forces. The Anatolia news agency said the excavations near Cizre in the village of Kuştepe were based on a tip-off, with the witness saying that some people suspected of aiding and abetting PKK members were taken away by the Cizre mayor in the 1990s and handed over to the members of the Turkish Hizbullah, which has no links the Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Turkish Hizbullah was an ultra-religious terrorist group allegedly supported by the state as an alternative to the PKK in the region but was later found to be guilty of many torture murders. The witness in Cizre said Hizbullah had questioned and then killed the people delivered to it, showing authorities where the bodies were buried. The village of Kuştepe was evacuated in 1991, with six families returning 10 years ago. While it was empty, Hizbullah used the village as a training ground.