Turkish General Killed in Air Crash

A general who led last year’s campaign against separatist Kurds died Wednesday when his military plane went down in flames on the outskirts of Ankara.

Interior Minister Ismet Sezgin told Parliament that the plane’s twin engines failed.

There was no immediate evidence of sabotage.

Gen. Esref Bitlis, the commander of gendarme forces, was en route to Diyarbakir, the main city in the Kurdish-dominated southeast.

Four other soldiers on the plane were killed.

In October, Bitlis supervised a military offensive against Turkish Kurdish rebel bases across the border in northern Iraq. After the campaign, Iraqi Kurdish leaders promised that they would no longer let Turkish Kurds use northern Iraq as a base for attacks on the military in southeastern Turkey.

The outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party has been fighting a guerrilla war for almost nine years.