Restrictions have been eased on the four Diril families who were forcibly evicted from Kovankaya village (local name: Mehri) and then held in Cevizagac after their village was burned down on 4 June 1994. However Zeki Ercan Diril and Ilyas Edip Diril remain “disappeared”. According to an account by two villagers the brothers had set out for Kovankaya with a sum of money from a Catholic charity in Istanbul. They had left this money with the Kurdish owner of the house they stayed in when they were halted at Uzungecit because the road ahead was mined. They were detained by local village guards and handed over to gendarmes from Uludere. Soldiers later confiscatd the money from the Kurdish man. The trial of Hurmuz Diril, an elder of Kovankaya, who was detained in Beytussebab on charges of assisting the PKK after he had complained about the eviction, and made inquiries about the “disappearances”, was due to begin at Diyarbakir State Security Court on 15 October.
