Shortly before his death, Mumcu was investigating how 100,000 firearms owned by the Turkish Armed Forces had ended up in the possession of Jalal Talabani, one of the Kurdish leaders of northern Iraq and, as of 2008, president of Iraq. Twenty-five days after the death of Mumcu, General Eşref Bitlis, who had been investigating the same issue, died in a plane crash, believed to be due to sabotage. In his 8 January "Cumhuriyet" article, titled "Ültimatom", Mumcu emphatically stated that he would soon reveal in a new book the ties between Kurdish nationalists and some intelligence organizations (i.e., Abdullah Öcalan and the National Intelligence Organization).