GÜLEÇ JUDGMENT OF 27 JULY 1998 16 He had given a second warning, but the armed men had continued to advance. Stones and sticks were then thrown at the gendarmes. The demonstrators had chanted many slogans, such as, “We want to enter the brigade building”. Mr Ersöz and some of his men in the front line had been wounded by flying stones. The armed demonstrators had taken advantage of this to try and seize the gendarmes’ weapons. Mr Ersöz had fired warning shots in the air, which had made the women and children disperse. He himself, his second lieutenant and his orderly had each fired about five shots. Consequently, between the three of them they would have fired about fifteen bullets, which the witness considered sufficient to make the demonstrators disperse. He and his men had then retreated to the side of the road. Ten seconds later they had come under very heavy fire from Kalashnikov-type automatic weapons fired by the armed men, who were also shooting with the weapons which they had stolen from the gendarmes. Mr Ersöz had used his radio to call up the Condor armoured vehicle as backup. The Condor had been standing about one kilometre away from his brigade building. When it reached his position it had managed to disperse the demonstrators without firing a shot. It had come from the gendarmes’ quarters and, in order to get to the brigade building, it must have gone past the post office, where the victim had been killed. However, Mr Ersöz did not know whether the Condor had opened fire on its way, but did remember that he had requested that the Condor be sent in exclusively as a deterrent and that the weapons mounted on the vehicle should not be used against the crowd. He knew the Condor crew but could not identify the person who had been driving the vehicle at the time. Mr Ersöz emphasised that PKK members provoked and built up this kind of incident, and threatened the local population to force them to participate in PKK-organised demonstrations. Refusing to take part could be fatal. There was a distance of 500 to 600 metres between the spot where the victim’s body was found and the place where he had taken up position with his men to defend his brigade’s building. They had been out of range of the place where the victim’s body was found and 100% of the spent cartridges found there had belonged to PKK members. Lastly, in relation to the investigation, Mr Ersöz said that he had made the necessary statements to the Diyarbakır National Security Court, the Principal Public Prosecutor and the lawyers.