Uludere raid papers requested

ANKARA - Hürriyet Daily News

Parliament’s Human Rights Commission has requested documents and information regarding December’s botched Uludere airstrike from the prosecutor handling the probe, Commission Chairman Ayhan Sefer Üstün said yesterday.

The investigation into the strike, which killed 34 civilians that had been mistaken for Kurdish militants at the Iraqi border on Dec. 28, 2011, has been handled by a special-authority prosecutor in the southeastern city of Diyarbakır.

The commission, which is conducting its own inquiry into the strike, has already received the Interior Ministry’s report, Üstün said.

The panel’s request for documents from the prosecutor came despite complaints from Chief of General Staff Necdet Özel that commission members had breached the confidentiality of the probe. “We are not hiding anything. We are handing over to prosecutors whatever information and documents we have. The judiciary has taken a secrecy decision over the probe but no one is observing it,” Özel said earlier this week. Authorities have yet to say who supplied the faulty intelligence that prompted the strike. The military has only said that the intelligence came from “national sources.”