If I grab the git repo and run autoreconf, I get this error:

Makefile.am: error: required file './NEWS' not found
Makefile.am: error: required file './ChangeLog' not found

As LTP doesn't use GNU standards you'll want to tell automake this by having in configure.ac:

AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE([foreign])

As a sidenote, you could replace include/mk/automake.mk with just "autoreconf" for the bootstrap. After that