On Oct. 7, the Firat news agency ran an unexpected story: Kurdish politician Hursit Kulter was holding a press conference in the Iraqi city of Kirkuk, months after he went missing in Turkey’s mainly Kurdish southeast. Even the Kulter family was bewildered as they had lost hope he would ever turn up alive. Activists had mounted a vocal and unrelenting campaign of pressure on Ankara to explain the young politician’s disappearance, which had fueled fears that Turkey was returning to the 1990s, when arbitrary detentions and extrajudicial killings were almost a daily occurrence at the height of the Kurdish conflict in the southeast.

Kulter, a senior member of the Democratic Regions Party’s provincial branch in Sirnak, a province bordering Iraq, went missing May 27 amid fierce clashes raging in urban areas across the southeast between the security forces and militants of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). According to Kulter’s account, the security forces held and tortured him in a basement in Sirnak for 13 days. He managed to escape and hide in empty buildings for 50 days before sneaking out of the city with the help of a “member of the resistance.” Because of safety concerns, he said, he could not inform his family and the press he was alive, and he apologized for keeping everyone in the dark.

“We were scared that we were returning to the era of extrajudicial killings in the 1990s,” Ebubekir Kulter told Al-Monitor after his brother reappeared in Kirkuk. The rogue conduct of the security forces in the 1990s left such a deep scar on Turkey’s Kurds that former Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, campaigning ahead of the Nov. 1, 2015, elections, sought to lure Kurdish support with an eerie warning that extrajudicial killings would resume if his party was voted out of power. And days before Davutoglu spoke, Turkey had been rattled by a video compounding the fears. A friend of Kulter’s, Haci Lokman Birlik, was killed in the clashes in Sirnak and his body was filmed being dragged behind a police vehicle tied by a rope.

Moreover, Sirnak has witnessed the highest number of extrajudicial killings in Turkey after Diyarbakir. According to the Memory Center, an Istanbul-based advocacy group, at least 211 people forcibly disappeared in Sirnak province from the Sept. 12, 1980, military coup to 2013, including two prominent local politicians, Serdar Tanis and Ebubekir Deniz, who remain unaccounted for since 2001 after being summoned to a gendarmerie station. Just as in Kulter’s case, the authorities had denied the pair was taken into custody.