Reuter

DIYARBAKIR, Turkey -- The chief of police and three other officers have been killed in an
ambush in the Turkish regional capital of Diyarbakir.

The state-run Anatolian news agency said gunmen opened fire on police chief Gaffar Okkan
and three colleagues soon after his car left the police station in the predominantly Kurdish
area.

Witnesses said police had set up a security cordon around the police station and the site of
the attack. Television pictures showed the unmarked car with smashed windows astride the
curb.

Diyarbakir was once the centre of Turkey's conflict with separatist Kurds but the rebels have
scaled down their demands from self-rule to Kurdish cultural rights and fighting has
dwindled since 1999.

Police in the southeast were most active in recent years in a crackdown against Hizbullah, an
Islamist group that began targeting rebel sympathisers in the mid-1980s and has been
implicated in more than 150 murders.

The youthful Okkan was prominent in the operation against Hizbullah, giving press
briefings as his officers raided houses and unearthed shallow graves of alleged victims of the
group.

The assassination-style killings of supporters of Abdullah Ocalan's Kurdistan Workers Party
(PKK) attributed to the group sparked charges it had the tacit approval of Turkish
authorities.

Turkey, which captured Ocalan and sentenced him to death for treason in 1999, vehemently
denies any such co-operation.
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The Kurdistan Observer
www.kurdistanobserver.com