The witnesses claimed that Sgt. Serkan İpek (24), killed on Jan. 17 in an operation against the PKK in the Sason district of Batman province, was shot by village guards -- local residents armed by the state to fight terrorists -- who may have accidentally opened fire on the wrong target due to heavy fog in the area. In a statement released on the controversy, the General Staff said the Kulp Prosecutor’s Office has launched an investigation. According to reports, three village guards were questioned as suspects and their automatic rifles have been seized by investigators.
Residents of the Hamzalı village in Diyarbakır’s Kulp district, which borders Sason, where İpek was killed, say they heard rifle shots on Sunday. One villager told reporters: “It was Sunday afternoon. There was heavy fog around the Zore brook. The area had been silent for a long while, and we hadn’t had any incidents in a long while before this. Around noon, we heard one rifle shot. We didn’t hear anything else. Everyone believes that village guards patrolling the area opened fire at security forces. If there was a PKK band in this clash, we would have heard other shot sounds. They would have had some losses, too. We want this to be investigated as thoroughly as possible.”
Meanwhile, İpek’s funeral was held in his hometown of Ereğli on Monday. İsmail Soylu, the soldier’s brother-in-law, talked to the press at the funeral, saying the bloodshed should be stopped. Soylu said the PKK was not standing up for the rights of Kurds and called on everyone to see this fact. “Our Kurdish citizens should not be fooled by this,” he said.
Thousands -- according to some reports, nearly 20,000 -- attended the funeral. İpek was serving at the Diyarbakır Kulp Gendarmerie Tactical Command.
While his mother, Sevdiye İpek, mourned, some of the soldier’s relatives criticized the government’s recent democratic initiative, launched last summer to end terrorism by expanding the rights of the country’s Kurds. As part of the initiative, a group of PKK members and some Kurdish refugees from northern Iraq returned to Turkey in October and were released after interrogation.
Sgt. İpek was killed and another senior sergeant was injured in an operation that took place in the area between Diyarbakır’s Kulp and Silvan districts and Batman’s Sason district on Sunday. Official statements initially stated that İpek was killed in a clash with the PKK, but shortly after the incident, area witnesses claimed that there were no terrorists in the region.
