Turkey car bomb kills seven on Kurdish PKK anniversary
Five police and two civilians reported killed in car bomb attack near Diyarbakir, on 32nd anniversary of start of Kurdish PKK movement
The scene of the blast near Diyarbakir (Reuters)
Published date: 15 August 2016 18:19 BST
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Last update: 8 years 3 months ago
Five Turkish police officers and two civilians were killed on Monday in a car bombing outside the southeastern city of Diyarbakir blamed on Kurdish PKK rebels, the government said.
The blast hit a police traffic control post on the highway leading southeast from Diyarbakir to the city of Batman, said Turkey's deputy prime minister Numan Kurtulmus.
The bomb was detonated on the 32nd anniversary of the taking up of arms by PKK, which began as an independence movement but has in recent years tempered its demands to autonomy for Kurds.
Television images showed the bombing had turned the three-storey police building to tangled rubble. Locals were also inspecting the trench where the ground had been blown out.
The latest bombing came after at least eight people, mostly civilians, were killed on Wednesday in two separate attacks blamed on PKK militants in Turkey's southeast.
Hundreds of members of the Turkish security forces have been killed by the PKK in attacks since the collapse of a two-year ceasefire in July last year.
The PKK had announced that it would cease attacks on Turkish targets in the wake of the coup attempt on 15 July against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
But earlier this month one of its senior leaders Cemil Bayik promised to target major cities and not give Turkish forces any respite.
An almost three-year-long fragile ceasefire came to an abrupt end in July last year and has led to some of the fiercest clashes in this ongoing conflict.
The government has vowed there will be no let-up in the fight against the PKK even in the wake of the coup.
On Monday, a senior intelligence official claimed that the PKK was working in cooperation with supporters of Fetullah Gulen, the exiled cleric the government blamed for the coup attempt.
More than 40,000 people have been killed since the PKK first took up arms in 1984. It is proscribed as a terrorist group by Turkey, the European Union and the United States.
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