Çarkın to show graves

ANKARA - Hürriyet Daily News

Ayhan Çarkın’s (C) confessions in relation to extrajudicial killings committed in the 1990s led to the arrest of a number of other special operatives, including Çarkın himself. AA photo

An Ankara court approved the prosecutor’s request for Ayhan Çarkın, a former special operations police officer who publicly confessed his involvement in extrajudicial killings, to lead investigators to the spot where agent Tarık Ümit’s body had allegedly been buried.

Çarkın indicated that Tarık Ümit, a former member of the National Intelligence Organization (MİT) who had disappeared March 2, 1995, had been murdered. He said he could lead investigators to the crime scene, according to the request submitted to the court.

Çarkın also said he could show where and how Behçet Cantürk had been killed in Istanbul’s Sapanca district after he was snatched from the Fenerbahçe Officers’ Club, the Anatolia news agency reported. Çarkın testified in court Dec. 20 in relation to an interview he had given to the daily Taraf only a day earlier in which he had raised the claims regarding Ümit.

Cantürk was a mob boss of Kurdish origin, whose name was on an alleged list of Kurdish businessmen to be killed prepared in the mid 1990s by security and intelligence officers.

Çarkın’s confessions in relation to extrajudicial killings committed in the 1990s by state-sponsored groups during the fight between government forces and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) led to the arrest of a number of other special operatives. These included İbrahim Şahin, the former deputy chief of the special operations department and a suspect in the ongoing Ergenekon probe.
Meanwhile, sources from within the Istanbul Chief Prosecutor’s Office denied earlier claims by Çarkın he had provided information to officials about Ümit and drew a sketch of the location where he had been murdered, while testifying on March 26, according to the Doğan news agency.

The court ruled that Çarkın was able to be taken from the high security prison where he is being held as of 2 p.m. yesterday for a period of seven days in order to show investigators the location where Ümit was buried. He will undergo a medical examination after he gets out of the prison and before he returns.

Ergenekon is an alleged ultranationalist, underground gang accused of planning to stage a coup to topple the government by spreading chaos. It is also thought to be an extension of the “deep state,” a supposed unofficial organization of the bureaucracy and military operating behind the scenes of the official state structure.