TURKEY'S Prime Minister, Mr Necmettin Erbakan, said yesterday that the Interior Minister, Mr Mehmet Agar, had handed in his resignation in a scandal over alleged links between the police and organised crime. Mr Erbakan accepted the resignation.
Mr Agar is at the centre of a scandal that has unravelled since a police chief, a wanted gangster and a former beauty queen died in the same car in a traffic accident last weekend.
Turkish television had said that Mr Agar stayed in the same hotel as the accident victims in the resort town of Kusadasi last weekend, suggesting he knew of any murky relationship between them.
Mr Agar, a right winger, is a member of the Foreign Minister, Ms Tansu filler's True Path Party (DYP).
A government MP, also a member of the DYP, who runs a Kurdish tribal militia fighting separatist guerrillas in the southeast, was in the car and is seriously injured in hospital.
A left wing party had called for a parliamentary censure motion against Mr Agar for failing to clear up the link between the police chief and Mr Abdullah Catli, a mobster, wanted in connection with heroin smuggling and political killings.
. Kurdish separatist rebels firing automatic weapons and rockets killed 15 people yesterday in an attack on a mini bus in southeast Turkey, the Anatolia news agency said. The attack, which also left 10 wounded, occurred near the town of Cukurca.