A bomb blast in Turkey’s Kurdish-majority southeast has killed a local government official and wounded at least two other people, authorities said Friday.
The explosion that state-run Anadolu news agency blamed on the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) tore through the area near a government building in Derik on Thursday.
The PKK, which has waged a bloody insurgency against the Turkish state since 1984, has resumed attacks on security forces since the rupture of a fragile ceasefire last year.
Muhammet Fatih Safiturk, who served as sub-prefect as well as mayor of Derik, was tasked by the government with running the area as part of a vast effort to replace local authorities suspected of PKK ties.
He “was martyred early Friday by wounds sustained in a PKK terrorist attack on his office a day earlier,” provincial authorities said in a statement.
After the attack security forces apprehended 20 people in the area and they were being held for questioning, Anadolu reported.
Ankara has replaced a string of local elected leaders in the Kurdish majority southeast, which the government says is part of its effort to battle the PKK.
Turkey’s main pro-Kurdish party, the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), on Sunday said it was pulling out of parliament after nine of its MPs including the two co-leaders were arrested in an unprecedented crackdown.
The arrest on Friday of the MPs, including party leaders Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag, added to tensions as Turkey wages a relentless battle against Kurdish militants and deals with the aftermath of a July 15 failed coup.
Source: AFP
