ERGI JUDGMENT OF 28 JULY 1998 10 31. The Commission found from the evidence of the witnesses that PKK activity in the area around the village in or around 1993 had been significant. There had been at least two incidents involving the village shortly before the operation on 29 September 1993. In one incident, a villager ,Cuma Bali, had been shot dead and in the other, another villager, Ibrahim Halil, and his father had left the village under gendarmerie protection after his house had been shot at and moved to Ziyaret where they joined the village guards. Halil had been in the mountains with the PKK and had returned of his own free will. The timing of the latter incident had not been established. The applicant’s written statement to the HRA referred to the move from the village taking place the day before the incident, whereas it had appeared from the applicant’s oral testimony that he had been absent from the village and he had had no real recollection of what he might have been told by others. Major Kuzu, who had remembered helping the family move, did not specify the date. 32. The PKK had tended to arrive from the north of the village under cover of the terrain, requiring the villagers to provide food and medicine. There had been no village guards in the village and no permanent security presence in the vicinity. The main road to the south of the village had been patrolled from time to time. 33. At Ergani, about 17 kilometres to the east, there was a central gendarmerie headquarters under the command of İsa Gündoğdu, a noncommissioned officer (“NCO”). There was also a district gendarmerie headquarters, under the command of Major Kuzu, and a separate commando unit. Major Kuzu was in overall command of the district and central gendarmerie and had frequently been absent in his additional capacity as commander of a commando unit which had often been in the field. 2. Events in Kesentaş on 29 September 1993 34. The Commission observed that there had been no detailed investigation or judicial finding of facts on the domestic level as regards the events which occurred in the village of Kesentaş on 29 September 1993. The Commission had accordingly based its findings on the evidence given orally before its delegates or submitted in writing in the course of the proceedings; in this assessment the co-existence of sufficiently strong, clear and concordant inferences or of similar unrebutted presumptions of fact and in addition the conduct of the parties when evidence is being obtained may be taken into account (see, mutatis mutandis, the Ireland v. the United Kingdom judgment of 18 January 1978, Series A no. 25, p. 65, § 161). 35. The Commission noted that the two gendarmes had stated in evidence that they had not in fact been at the village when the clash had occurred. Major Kuzu had stated that he was in an operation elsewhere