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Villager tipped off military about Hakkari attack two months ago
A villager who lives near the attacked military outpost said he knew terrorists would attack the outpost two months ago and added that another villager had informed the Şemdinli Gendarmerie Command about the planned attack one week before the assault.
Nine Turkish soldiers were killed at the Tekeli Battalion Command in Şemdinli on June 19 in an attack carried out by terrorists belonging to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Two other soldiers were killed by a land mine in the same region, raising the number of slain soldiers to 11 in a day.
The villagers said a terrorist codenamed Rüstem had come to the village three days before the attack and gathered information about the outpost from the villagers through the use of threats. The terrorist reportedly asked the villagers about the number of soldiers in the command, when they train and when guards change in the unit.
According to the villagers’ accounts, terrorists began placing heavy weapons on the mountains surrounding the unit one month before the attack and opened harassment fire at the command.
In a briefing to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan soon after the attack, Gen. Gürbüz Kaya, the commander of the battalion, said figures were first spotted on security cameras at 11:30 p.m. on June 18. The command opened fire with heavy artillery in the direction of the suspected terrorists. Kaya said the battalion commander concluded that the individuals sighted in the security cameras had to be shepherds, villagers or smugglers since the band of figures shown in the camera did not respond to the battalion’s fire.
However, villagers say they have not been grazing their animals in the region around the command for a long time because large tracts of land have mines on them. They said it is not possible for smugglers or shepherds to be in the region around the command at night.
All the details of the attack point to serious weaknesses in intelligence. There has yet to be a satisfactory explanation of how such a large band of terrorists could approach an outpost unnoticed. On top of that, Kaya -- who said that they stopped firing, thinking the terrorists were shepherds -- still remains at his post.
İstanbul police captured six individuals linked to the Maoist Communist Party (MKP) on June 25. According to police sources, three of the individuals confessed to being involved in two terrorist acts in the eastern province of Tunceli in 1999 and 2000. Seven security officers were killed in those attacks.
The remaining three said they were not involved in any terrorist attack, but were planning to travel to Greece to attend an MKP meeting there. The suspects were awaiting arrest at an İstanbul court at the time Today’s Zaman went into print.
In the meantime, police evacuated a courthouse in İstanbul’s district of Kadıköy after receiving a notice that a ready-to-explode bomb had been placed in the building. Security forces searched the whole building with K9 units but failed to find any bomb or similar device. Police say the notice most probably aimed to spark fear among İstanbul residents.
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