ANKARA, Dec 22 (AFP) - A parliamentary commission here Wednesday blamed local authorities in mainly Kurdish southeastern Turkey's for the killings last month of a 12-year-old boy and his father and the 1993 disappearance of 11 villagers, the Anatolia news agency reported.
Commission chairman Mehmet Elkatmis accused police in Kiziltepe, a town in Mardin province, of "heavy negligence" in the shooting deaths on November 21 of Ahmet Kaymaz and his 12-year-old son, Ugur.
Police said the father and son were gunned down outside their home in what they described as a raid against armed Kurdish rebels, but local rights activists and neighbors said the two were unarmed civilians.
"The persons killed and those against whom the operation was intended were not the same people," the report said, urging that the local authorities involved be suspended to ensure the fairness of the pending investigation.
The commission report said the pair "could have been captured unharmed if the security forces had tried," according to Anatolia.
A second report by the commission urged an investigation into the disappearance of 11 people from the village of Alaca, in Diyarbakir province, whose remains local villagers said they discovered last month in what they described as a "mass grave."
The 11 men went missing after they were detained during a 1993 security operation against Kurdish rebels in the region.
The report said the local prosecutor, instead of conducting an immediate inspection at the gravesite, asked the villagers to collect the remains they found and bring them to his office.
Forensic experts will determine whether the bones and shreds of clothing belong to the missing villagers, the report said, but even if the result is negative, local authorities will still be held responsible for the men's disappearance.
The two incidents created a furor in Turkey and were seen as a test for the country's commitment to democracy human rights as it seeks to join the European Union.
The EU, at a historic summit last week in Brussels, invited Turkey to begin membership talks next October, but the country must ensure that recent legislation it adopted to improve human rights is applied at all levels.
12/22/2004 16:11 GMT - AFP