Reining in the Army; Police-linked bombers sought to spark ethnic unrest. Instead they may help break the cycle of violence.

Byline: Owen Matthews and Sami Kohen

Seferi Yilmaz was sitting with friends in his bookshop, in the remote mountain town of Semdinli in southeastern Turkey, when the grenade came rolling in. He dived for a back door just in time. The blast blew out the front of the shop and left two dead. There was little doubt that Yilmaz, a former Kurdish rebel who had served 15 years in jail for terrorism, was the intended target. Five Turkish soldiers were killed in rebel attacks around Semdinli over the last six months, and anonymous leaflets threatening revenge had been circulating in the town. On Nov. 1, a mysterious bomb blast downtown wrecked several shops and houses and injured dozens. The question was, who wanted Seferi Yilmaz dead?

The answer has shocked Turkey--and touched off a scandal that could rock the country's powerful security forces to the core. A crowd of townspeople caught four apparent perpetrators as they ran from Yilmaz's devastated shop and made a fair attempt at beating them to death. According to eyewitnesses, one of the fugitives shot dead a member of the mob before they were rescued by police. The shooter turned out to be Ali Kaya, a 32-year-old sergeant from the intelligence service of Turkey's Gendarmerie, or paramilitary police. An apparent accomplice was Veysel Ates, a police informer and former member of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK. The Renault 19 the men had used was registered to Gendarmerie intelligence and contained Kalashnikovs and explosives. Most incriminating, police found an official Gendarmerie watch list of 105 "suspicious" locals with some of their names and addresses--including Yilmaz's--marked with red ink.

News that members of the Turkish military had apparently been caught red-handed in a vigilante attack against Kurds set the region ablaze. Riots broke out through the week amid fears that the scandal would be hushed up by the authorities, like so many allegations of torture and extra-judicial killings by security forces in the 1980s and '90s. In fact, this time things may turn out differently. Europe's eyes are on Turkey as it starts negotiations to join the European Union. Encouraged by Brussels, Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has slowly but surely been edging the military out of politics. The Semdinli incident could be just what he needs to decisively complete the job. Erdogan was quick to ...