"Clues that raise suspicion in this direction cannot be brushed aside," Yakin Erturk, the UN Human Rights Commission's rapporteur on violence against women, told reporters after a fact-finding trip to three provinces in the conservative southeast.

"The information I collected does not allow me to conclude that all of these are ordinary suicides," she said. "The authorities should examine with great meticulousness such suspicious cases."

Erturk explained that many of the suicide cases reported to her in the provinces of Batman, Sanliurfa and Van did not appear to be suspicious.

"I would like to note, however, that senior justice and law enforcement officials informed me about cases in which there were reasonable grounds to believe that the suicide was instigated or that a so-called honor killing was disguised as a suicide or an accident," she said.

She cited as an example a case in which a woman who appeared to have hanged herself was found to have severe bruises on her body.

The practice of honor killings, in which a woman is slain for having "stained" family honor, usually by engaging in an extra-marital affair, has long marred Turkey's drive to improve women's rights, a key demand of the European Union which it is seeking to join.

The practice is mostly seen in the impoverished southeast, where a large part of the predominantly Kurdish population is still in the grip of die-hard patriarchal and tribal traditions.

Honor killings and blood feuds have claimed 1,190 lives in Turkey in the past six years, according to police figures.

Ankara has toughened penalties for perpetrators of such killings, now punishable by life in prison, and passed other laws boosting women's rights.

But Erturk charged that "authorities too often lack the wilingness to implement these laws" and "politicians and administrators are often inclined to arrange themselves with local power norms at the expense of women's rights."

She said more women than men were committing suicide in southeast Turkey, contrary to the worldwide trend.

"I have found that the patriarchal order and the human rights violations that go along with it -- for example, forced and early marriages and domestic violence -- are often key contributing factors to suicides of women," she said.

Additional pressure results from poverty, migration, child sexual abuse in the family and political tensions in the region, she added.

Erturk is to pen a report on her findings and suggest further measures to the Ankara government.