Ankara - Five people were taken into custody on Tuesday after the discovery of possible human bones in excavations in a village in south-east Turkey, the Anadolu news agency reported.

Acting on evidence given to a local prosecutors office that Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) sympathizers had been executed by Islamic fundamentalists, excavations began on Monday in the village of Kustepe. Turkish media reported that 20 bones, possibly human, had been discovered during Monday's digging.

Citing unnamed sources, Anadolu said that in the 1990s a number of people who were accused of aiding and abetting the PKK had been taken by people close to the then mayor of the nearby town of Cizre.

The alleged sympathizers were then handed over to members of Hezbollah, a hardline Turkish Islamic group which is not related to the Lebanese group of the same name.

Despite its Islamic identity, Hezbollah was reportedly supported by secret groups within the secular Turkish military as a means to hit the separatist PKK when fighting in south-east Turkey was at its height in the 1990s.

The organization was effectively closed down in 2000 after the discovery that the group had moved from killing alleged PKK sympathizers to moderate Islamists.

After raids on various Hezbollah safe houses in Istanbul, and a shootout that left Hezbollah leader Huseyin Velioglu dead, police discovered the bodies of dozens of people tortured and murdered by the group.

Anadolu reported that the five taken into custody on Tuesday included relatives of the former mayor of Cizre, Kamil Atak, and that police were searching for the mayor himself.

The ongoing investigation into the so-called Ergenekon gang, a shadowy group of fiercely secular nationalists which allegedly planned to overthrow the moderate Islamic government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has again raised the issue of a secret group within the gendarmery, a military force responsible for policing in rural areas.

The group, known as Jitem but whose existence has never been officially recognised, was established by retired General Veli Kucuk who prosecutors allege to have been a leading player in the Ergenekon gang. (dpa)