PKK claims responsibility for killing of 2 Turkish police officers

Two Turkish police were found dead Wednesday in the southeastern town of Ceylanpinar close to the Syrian border, the local governor said.

The PKK later claimed responsibility for the attack, according to local reports.

"A punitive action was carried out," the PKK's armed wing, the People's Defence Forces (HPG), said in a statement on its website. 

The banned Kurdish group said that the killings were "a retaliation to the attack in Suruc" - a reference to Monday's bombing that killed at least 32 people at a cultural centre in the border town and injured more than 100. The Hurriyet daily reported both had been shot in the head. 

Some Kurdish factions have been quick to blame Ankara for the attack, saying that it had not done enough to prevent the rise of the Islamic State group (IS). 

"This attack has unfortunately been facilitated by Turkey," said lan Semo, the UK-based representative of the the Democratic Union Party. "They want to destabilise the region and have serious issues with [parts of northern Syria] being under Kurdish control." 

However, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has firmly denied the claims. 

“I’m calling on those who attempt to score political goals through the very young while their ties with terrorist organisations are obvious. It is enough now that you have contaminated politics with blood,” he said late on Tuesday. 

“There is no cooperation with terror, arms and murder gangs in the AKP’s history,” Davutoglu said on his Twitter account shortly before midnight, some 12 hours before Turkey briefly shut down Twitter in an attempt to stop photos from Monday's massacre from being shared. 

A government official said Turkey had asked Twitter to remove 107 URLs with images of the attack after a Suruc court issued a ban on the publication of images related to the bombing. 

The Turkish government official, speaking to the opposition newspaper Today's Zaman, said access to Twitter was restored after a few hours after the company "removed malicious content, including hate speech, in line with the court order".

The Suruc attack has been blamed on IS militants, although the group does not appear to have officially claimed the bombing. The authorities have now identified a 20-year-old Turkish man as the main suspect, but are also probing female remains and looking into the possibility of a second suicide bomber. 

The previous AKP government had been edging toward a peace deal with the PKK, which would have ended decades' worth of violence that has left 40,000 people dead. However, the processes appeared to stall last year when tensions exploded over the perceived Turkish lack of action in the Syrian town of Kobane where IS militants were trying to root out Kurdish forces. Things soured further when 19 people were killed in clashes between police and pro-Kobane protestors.