PKK blast kills two in Turkey; officer knifed to death hailed as hero

ANKARA: Two civilians working on a construction site in Turkey’s southeast were killed on Monday in a bomb blast blamed on the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), state media said.

The two workers lost their lives when their vehicle was struck by a roadside bomb in the Semdinli district of the southeastern Hakkari province, which borders Iran and Iraq, the state-run Anadolu news agency said.

It said the attack was carried out by the PKK, which has waged an insurgency against the Turkish state in the southeast for over three decades that has claimed tens of thousands of lives.

It observed a cease-fire from 2013 but fighting resumed again in summer of 2015. Hundreds of members of the Turkish security forces have been killed since, and army has claimed killing thousands of militants.

The PKK is classified as a terror group by Turkey, the EU and the US.

Ankara has been waging a remorseless campaign in the last months to destroy the PKK and the Interior Ministry said in its latest update Monday that 28 of the group’s militants had been killed and 14 surrendered in the last week alone.

There were angry reactions from across the political spectrum in recent days when a 15-year-old schoolboy was shot dead by the PKK in clashes in the northeastern Trabzon region.

Meanwhile, Istanbul’s police chief on Monday hailed as a hero a 24-year-old officer stabbed to death by a suspected member of Daesh, who had been arrested for allegedly planning a suicide attack.

Sinan Acar was attacked with a knife by the suspect, who has not been named, after the man was brought by car for questioning to the headquarters of Istanbul police late Sunday.

Acar later died of his wounds while the suspected Daesh member was shot dead on the spot by other police officers.

Speaking at a funeral ceremony for the slain officer, police chief Mustafa Caliskan said Acar and his colleagues had prevented a potentially significant attack by arresting the suspect.

“The man arrested was someone who was the subject of an international search,” said Caliskan. “We think that a very serious attack was prevented.”

“It must be known that in this country people like Sinan will live on,” he said at the ceremony also attended by Istanbul Gov. Vasip Sahin.

It was not immediately clear how the suspect managed to keep a knife while being taken into custody.

At the funeral, Acar’s mother, overcome by emotion, was supported by a female police officer, an AFP correspondent said. He will later be buried in his native Bursa region.

Turkey was hit in 2016 by a succession of attacks that left hundreds dead in the bloodiest year of terror strikes in its history.

The attacks were blamed on Daesh terrorists as well as the PKK who have battled the Turkish state in an insurgency lasting more than three decades.

Last month, anti-terror officers in Istanbul detained dozens of alleged Daesh members, several of whom were said to be preparing a “sensational attack” in Turkey, police said.

An attack by a terrorist on an elite nightclub in Istanbul just 75 minutes into New Year’s Day in 2017 left 39 people dead, mainly foreigners.

There has since been a lull in similar attacks, but tensions and high security remain in big cities.