The application was submitted by the head of the Silopi Bar Association, Nuşirevan Elçi, and lawyers for the families of two businessmen, Mehmet Bilgiç and Halil Birlik. The two had disappeared in the late 1990s.
For the past few days, Yıldırım Beğler, a longtime translator for the military, has shared spine-chilling claims about illegal groups in the military and their activities in the ‘90s, including an allegation that some of the top commanders in the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) were captured in northern Iraq by a Special Forces Command squad in 1996 but released under orders from generals. Beğler, a Kirkuk Turkmen who came to Turkey in 1995, worked as a General Staff translator for 14 years. He now lives in Norway, near Oslo, where he has political refugee status. In his latest revelations, Beğler called on prosecutors conducting the investigation into Ergenekon, a clandestine gang charged with plotting to overthrow the government, to act, describing the precise location of some of the bodies disposed of in illegal operations by the Special Forces Command.
The lawyers for the Bilgiç and Birlik families said if expected excavations are carried out and if human bones are discovered, the remains would be compared with the DNA samples of the two businessmen.
“A person who served the armed forces for 16 years needs to be trusted. There are around 70 applications for missing people in the Silopi Public Prosecutor’s Office. The claims should have been investigated thoroughly after they hit the newspapers and TV stations, but the prosecutor’s office has remained inactive so far. If other people spur into action before prosecutors, evidence may be destroyed. Therefore, prosecutors should hurry up,” Elçi remarked.
