Vanished politician reappears
ISTANBUL— A Kurdish politician who had been missing from southeastern Turkey since May resurfaced in Iraq recently after months of speculation that the Turkish authorities had detained him.
The politician, Hursit Kulter, 33, a provincial leader of the Democratic Regions Party in the predominantly Kurdish southeastern town of Sirnak, disappeared on May 27.
The area was under a curfew imposed by the Turkish government as part of a counterterrorism military campaign against Kurdish militants in the region.
“I won’t get out,” Mr. Kulter wrote in a text message to his family on that day. “Give my greetings to everyone.”
Hours after he was reported missing, Twitter accounts that claimed to be associated with Turkish special operations teams in the area said he had been arrested and was being interrogated.
The Turkish government denied those claims.
Violence surged in Turkey’s volatile southeast after a fragile peace process broke down in July.
Kurdish militants have waged an insurgency in the region for more than three decades as part of a campaign for more rights and autonomy.
Kulter’s case led some human rights advocates to accuse Turkish security forces of reverting to the practice of forced disappearances that was used during the earlier years of the Kurdish conflict in the 1990s.
Kulter surfaced in Kirkuk Province in Iraq and apologized for his absence, saying security conditions had not permitted him to speak out until now.
He said he had been detained by the police on May 27 and held in a basement and tortured for 13 days before he escaped.
“They forced me to be an informant,” Kulter said during a news conference in Iraq, according to local news reports.
“They wanted to me to make a statement against the struggle for autonomy and continuously threatened to execute me.”
The Turkish government rejected accusations of foul play, said a senior government official, speaking on the condition of anonymity in line with government protocol.
The official called Kulter’s disappearance a publicity stunt orchestrated by Kurdish militants from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party.