From: trh@jack.sns.com (Al Trh)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.turkish
Subject: PKK kills.../Aegean Mishap--NEWS
Date: 3 Oct 1992 00:37:00 -0500
Organization: UTexas Mail-to-News Gateway
Reply-To: Turkish Cultural Program List <TRKNWS-L%USCVM.BitNet@pucc.PRINCETON.EDU>
NNTP-Posting-Host: cs.utexas.edu

 FIVE DEAD AS U.S. MISSILE HITS TURKISH SHIP
 (ANKARA, Reuter - October 2, 1992)

 The captain of a Turkish destroyer and four of his crew were killed when
 a missile fired in error by a U.S. aircraft carrier hit their ship during
 NATO night war games in the Aegean Sea.

 A Turkish armed forces statement said on Friday the captain, Kudret
 Gungor, was among the dead on the warship Muavenet after what it called ''a
 regrettable incident.'' Fifteen other sailors were wounded.

 NATO's top commander in Europe apologised on Friday for the accidental
 missile firing by the carrier Saratoga.

 ''On behalf of myself and the U.S. government, I want to offer our
 apologies and our agony over this most tragic accident,'' U.S. General John
 Shalikashvili, Supreme Allied Commander Europe, told a news conference in
 Bielefeld, Germany

 He refused to speculate on how the missiles came to be fired from the
 carrier.

 The two vessels were about three miles apart and about 80 miles west of
 the Turkish port of Izmir when the missiles streaked across the darkened
 sea at 2211 GMT on Thursday.

 A spokesman at Nato's Southern Europe Command in Naples said the aircraft
 carrier Saratoga had fired two anti-aircraft Sea Sparrow missiles in what
 he called a ''highly unusual accident.''

 The destroyer ''was hit on the bridge by a weapon that can do extensive
 damage,'' Captain Jim Mitchell told Reuters in Ankara.

 He said a missile launch was not part of the naval exercises the Saratoga
 had been carrying out with the twin-funnel former U.S. destroyer dating
 back to World War Two.

 Fire broke out on the Muavenet's bridge. It was put out in about 10
 minutes by Turkish and allied ships in the area but flared again briefly
 during the night, Mitchell said.

 ''In the regrettable incident arising from an error by the U.S. vessel ,
 navy captain Kudret Gungor and four crew members were killed, and 15 others
 were wounded,'' said a brief statement from the Turkish armed forces
 general staff in Ankara.

 Mitchell said 14 Turks had been injured, three of them seriously. One
 had been taken to hospital in Izmir and the other two were being treated on
 the U.S. ship Iwo Jima.

 He said rescue work had been completed and the Muavenet would be towed  to
 Izmir, an operation he estimated would take at least a day. The Saratoga
 would stay at sea for the time being.

 U.S. Sixth Fleet commander, Vice-Admiral Joseph Lopez, who is on the spot
 in his flagship Belknap, has convened a board of inquiry, Mitchell said.
 Turkey and NATO would also be involved.

 But there was unlikely to be a swift verdict on how the two missiles came
 to be fired from the Saratoga. It was still not clear if one or both
 missiles had struck the Muavenet, he added.

 NATO sources in Brussels said there had been complaints for years about
 the poor quality of equipment and communications in the Mediterranean
 region on the alliance's southern flank.

 Many NATO members operating in the region have outdated equipment. The
 Muavenet, launched in the United States in 1944, is one of 12 former U.S.
 destroyers in the Turkish fleet that were built at the end of or just
 after the war.

 The Saratoga is one of the oldest U.S. aircraft carriers still in service.
 It belongs to the Forrestal class and was commissioned in 1956, although it
 has been modernised and carries three pods of Sea Sparrow launchers.

 Human error rather than technical failure probably caused the accidental
 firing of a U.S. anti-aircraft missile that blasted the bridge of a
 Turkish destroyer and killed the captain and four crew, experts said
 Friday.

 ''The best educated guess was that someone pushed the button when they
 should not have done,'' Paul Beaver of the authoritative Jane's Defense
 Weekly said in Brussels.

 It was the worst example of an American military blunder since a Navy
 cruiser shot down an Iranian airliner in the Persian Gulf in 1988. Human
 error was blamed for that incident which killed 290 people died.

 There have been other incidents since the shooting down of the Iranian
 airliner in 1988. In November 1989, the Navy briefly suspended all
 operations after a series of accidents.

 More recently, a U.S. warship off the coast of the former Yugoslavia
 briefly ''locked on'' to a British plane flying aid to the beleaguered city
 of Sarajevo.


 KURDISH REBELS KILL 55 CIVILIANS IN SMALL VILLAGE
 (BITLIS, Reuter - October 2, 1992)

 Kurdish rebels massacred most of the inhabitants of a remote Turkish
 village and only three old men escaped unhurt, local journalists and
 officials said on Friday.

 Officials at the office of the emergency rule governor in Diyarbakir said
 the death toll rose to 55 by mid-afternoon as many of the 25 villagers
 wounded in the massacre died in hospital.

 The separatist guerrillas of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK)
 killed babies and children and set fire to the 15 houses in the Thursday
 evening attack on Cevizdali village in the southeastern province of Bitlis,
 they said.

 Many of the victims were shot dead outside their homes, but officials said
 at least 14 wounded died during the day in hospitals in Bitlis and
 neighbouring Siirt and Dyarbakir.

 Journalists who visited the mountain village on Friday said only three men
 in their 70s were spared by the guerrillas.

 ''Let's not waste bullets on them,'' the survivors told journalists they
 heard the rebels saying.

 The dead included three babies aged between three and six months and at
 least five other children up to 13 years old.

 Fourteen others were state-paid village guards who tried unsuccessfully to
 fight off the guerrillas.

  Victims said the guerrillas attacked as evening fell and a dying boy told
 Reuters he saw the rebels torch his home before gunning down villagers en
 masse.

  ''About 20 PKK men forced us out of our home and took us to outside the
 village. We saw them bomb and burn our homes. Then they came and gunned us
 all down. That's all I remember,'' 13-year-old Orhan Akpolat said.

 The rebels attacked the village two days after Turkish authorities said
 the PKK suffered its worst losses in its eight-year campaign for an
 independent homeland in the southeast for Turkey.

 The guerrillas lost more than 200 men in a battle with Turkish forces
 last Tuesday near the Iraqi frontier, according to Turkish officials.

 Interior Minister Ismet Sezgin said on Thursday night some 100 rebels
 attacked Cevizdali and set its 15 houses on fire before fleeing.

 ''There is no one left in the village,'' 15-year-old Remziye Kaptan said
 from her hospital bed. She said the rebels attacked soon after the guards
 manned their positions outside the village as they did each evening to
 protect the inhabitants.
Newsgroups: soc.culture.turkish