Global Security Newswire

Human rights activists are probing claims that Turkey used chemical weapons against Kurdish guerrilla fighters in October, the London Telegraph reported on Monday (see GSN, Aug. 13, 2010).

Advocates for a greater degree of independence for Turkey's ethnic minority Kurds have been distributing photographs of the bodies of 24 Kurdistan Workers Party militants killed in air attacks in the eastern part of the country on Oct. 19. The photographs show blackened bodies with missing limbs.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan dismissed the reports at the Group of 20 nations summit in Cannes, France.

"This is slander," he said. "The operations in the Kazan Valley were carried out by our air force.

"The [bodies of] PKK members who were killed in the caves are currently in the Forensic Medicine Institute in Malatya, where everything is proceeding according to the law, down to the DNA tests," Erdogan added.

But Kurdish activists assert the only possible explanation for the kind of burns displayed on the corpses would be chemical weapons.

Some pro-Kurdish rights lawmakers in Ankara and the Turkish Human Rights Association are taking the chemical weapons accusations seriously.

"One of our branches in the area has acted to investigate whether chemical weapons were used or not," a spokesman from the human rights group said.

The spokesman said chemical samples had been gathered from facilities in the region and from the garments of 13 of the dead PKK militants (Richard Spencer, London Telegraph, Nov. 6).