The dig in the town of Silopi, Sirnak province, was ordered by a prosecutor in February after newspapers published claims that several people who went missing in the 1990s at the height of a Kurdish insurgency in the region were in fact executed by security forces.

According to the claims, their bodies were dumped into wells filled with acid or buried alongside the road linking Silopi and the nearby town on Cizre.

Scores of workers and two earth-moving machines were involved in Monday's dig near a military facility in Silopi, the news agency said.

The prosecutor has ordered excavations at four other sites.

The bodies of four people who went missing were unearthed in the region in the past decade, the last found in 2005 buried in a roadside grave.

Turkey's mainly Kurdish southeast has been the scene of deadly fighting between the Turkish army and the Kurdistan Workers' Party, which picked up arms in 1984 for self-rule in the region.

The conflict has left 44,00 people dead, displaced thousands and led to allegations of gross human rights violations on both sides, including extrajudicial killings.