ANKARA, April 5 (Reuters) - Seven Iraqi Kurd civilians were killed in northern Iraq by a
landmine apparently laid by Turkish Kurd guerrillas, an Iraqi Kurd party official said on
Thursday.

Safeen Dizayee, representative of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) in Ankara, said
two other people were injured in the blast on Tuesday evening on a remote road in Barwari
district.

"According to security experts who have gone to the scene, the first indication is that the
PKK was responsible for laying the mine," Dizayee said. He was referring to the Kurdistan
Workers Party that has an estimated 5,000 fighters in northern Iraq and Iran.

He said there had been a lull in PKK activities in the region since last September. "We hope
they will not make the mistake of pursuing these kind of activities," he added.

The PKK, blamed by Ankara for a 16-year campaign for Kurdish self-rule in south-east
Turkey in which 30,000 people were killed, has largely withdrawn from Turkey since the
capture of its leader Abdullah Ocalan in 1999.

Ocalan is on death row in Turkey awaiting a European Court of Human Rights ruling on his
sentence for treason.

The Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq has been under the control of two factions of Iraqi
Kurds, the KDP and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), since the end of the 1991 Gulf
War.

Fighting between the two factions killed thousands of people in the 1990s but a 1998
Washington-brokered peace treaty bound both sides to block the PKK from using northern
Iraq as a base.

The KDP has fought against the PKK alongside Turkish forces which frequently enter
northern Iraq in pursuit of the rebels.

Dizayee said those killed by the landmine were engineers employed by the Kurdish
administration to work on repopulation projects in the region, devastated by a decade of
conflict.

The road where the landmine was laid had been used regularly in recent weeks, indicating
that the mine was laid recently, Dizayee said.
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The Kurdistan Observer
www.kurdistanobserver.com