Top intel body discloses info on operative

DİYARBAKIR

Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization (MİT) has divulged significant details regarding a fugitive operative codenamed “Yeşil” in a top secret memo to the Specially Authorized Diyarbakır Prosecutor’s Office, which is tasked with investigating unsolved murders from the 1990s.

MİT indicated that the services of Yeşil – also known as Mahmut Yıldırım – were only employed in an aborted operation to capture Abdullah Öcalan, the currently jailed leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), from his former headquarters in Damascus at the start of the 1990s, as well in another operation to capture senior PKK leader Şemdin Sakık in northern Iraq.

MİT’s memo also added that Yıldırım was employed in two other operations whose subject matter it did not disclose, according to daily Habertürk.

Yıldırım has been on the run since 1996 and is suspected of being the culprit in dozens of unsolved murders. His whereabouts and whether he is dead or alive remain unknown.

Mehmet Eymür, a former senior leader of MİT had previously told the Ankara Chief Prosecutor’s Office that Yeşil had worked for MİT and JİTEM, an intelligence unit of the gendarmerie.