Heron images show victims of Uludere airstrike were villagers

“If we did not have the information from our visit to the region following the incident, it would have been impossible for us to say for sure that those people were smugglers. A person who sees only this video footage will not be able to say much more either. It is clear that there are people walking in groups and that they are then bombed. There is also a herd of animals, but it is impossible to know what they are carrying. I asked experts about this and they also said they would not be able to tell from the images alone,” he said.

Şener also said it is not possible to make a judgment based on just the Heron footage shown.

The deaths of the 34 smugglers in Uludere have been attributed to faulty intelligence; the deceased were mistaken for Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) terrorists. The government later acknowledged that the victims were smugglers, not terrorists. The military issued a statement saying the warplanes had targeted the group based on intelligence that suggested a group of armed terrorists would be heading towards the Turkish border to stage attacks on the military.

Ertuğrul Kürkçü, a member of the commission and a deputy from the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), said the footage captured by Herons clearly shows those people are villagers engaged in smuggling, and added that some AK Party members who say they are not act out of political concerns.

“The footage and the testimonies of villagers overlap. I personally have no doubt that they are smugglers. My understanding would not have changed even if I had not heard anything from villagers or if I was exposed to such images for the first time,” he said. “Trucks which carry goods are waiting out in the open. The number of animals in the herd is greater than the number of people on the road. They do not act like they have any security concerns. It is obvious that they are not a guerilla group.”

Kürkçü also said it was even more obvious after the first bombing that they were villagers.

“The bombing should have stopped after the first targets were shot,” he said. “The way the villagers communicate with the village, the way they talk to each other and the way they are grouping so obviously in the mountain roads give us enough clues that they are civilians.

After the first bombing, they run toward each other instead of running away from each other.”

Kürkçü said there is no way out and that light will be shed on this “massacre.” He said the General Staff should share all the information it has on how it makes a distinction between guerillas and smugglers.

Another commission member, Malik Ecder Özdemir, a deputy from the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), asked: “How was it decided that those people were terrorists? Was any other information and intelligence presented to the government, which gave the order to shoot, other than those images?”

He also said it is clear that the people in the Heron images are smugglers because they clearly show that at the very beginning there were seven or eight trucks waiting for a while in the region, and that the villagers came to meet them.

“The images do not give the photographs of the people of course but they are obviously smugglers,” he said and added that the General Staff should share all the information it has on the matter.

“Those who say it is not possible to tell that the people were smugglers should also say that it is not possible to know that the people were terrorists,” he said.

Atilla Kaya, a member of the commission from the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), said the images are not as clear as in a regular photograph, so it is hard to say whether they are smugglers or terrorists. “We can only comment based on all the information we have regarding which methods smugglers and terrorists use,” he said. “There are many questions: Does the terrorist organization make itself a clear target like that?”

He also noted that there have been reports that Fehman Hüseyin, a PKK terrorist, was among the smugglers. “There was intense intelligence activity. The smugglers were made targets,” he added.

Members of the parliamentary sub-commission tasked with investigating the Uludere incident promised to shed light on the incident.

There are a number of investigations under way into the Uludere incident. Two inspectors from the Interior Ministry are investigating the military, and a military inspector is investigating the role of the gendarmerie in the region. The Diyarbakır Prosecutor’s Office is conducting a separate investigation. Both the prosecutor’s office and the two ministry inspectors have seen the four hours of footage acquired from Herons.