Bomb kills 10 in Turkey's Kurdish region

DIYARBAKIR: Ten people including seven children were killed in the largest city in Turkey's mainly Kurdish southeast when a powerful bomb went off accidentally in a crowded park, officials said on Wednesday.      

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for Tuesday's blast here, the deadliest in a string of bombings across Turkey this year, but suspicions fell on the separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) which has been fighting the government since 1984, police said.           

The incident coincided with the first visit to Ankara of a special US envoy tasked with coordinating joint efforts against the PKK, listed as a terrorist group by both countries.           

The bomb exploded at around 9:00 pm (1900 GMT) near a bus stop at a crowded park in Diyarbakir's impoverished Baglar district, in which tea gardens are a favorite venue to relax in the evenings.              

It was heard throughout the city, shattering the windows of buildings and opening small cracks in several walls.     

Officials said 14 people were injured. Four of them remained in hospital Wednesday.    

"The preliminary investigation established that the blast occurred while the home-made remote-control device, planted in a flask, was being carried" to another location, the office of the local governor said.             

It give no details about the intended target of the attack or who the perpetrators were. A major complex housing various police units is about one kilometre from the spot where the bomb went off.          

Diyarbakir is a hotbed of activity of the PKK, which has a solid base in the city of around one million people.       

A Kurdish organization serving as an umbrella for the PKK and its associates condemned the blast and said that "the Kurdish freedom movement has no link with the blast," in a statement carried by the pro-Kurdish Firat news agency.        

A radical group which the PKK says it has no control over, the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons, has claimed 15 bombings across Turkey this year, including tourist resorts in the west, which killed nine people and injured around 200.      

Diyarbakir's Kurdish mayor, Osman Baydemir, condemned the blast as a blow to efforts to restore peace in the southeast, where the 22-year Kurdish conflict has claimed more than 37,000 lives.   

"This is a provocation. This is a sabotage of peace," Baydemir said.         

The bloodshed came only a day after Turkey's main Kurdish party, the Democratic Society Party, urged the PKK to call a ceasefire.            

The PKK has stepped up violence this year after it called off a five-year unilateral truce in June 2004.      

At least 75 members of the security forces and 104 rebels have been killed in clashes and attacks since the beginning of the year, according to an AFP count.            

In Ankara, US envoy Joseph W Ralston, a former NATO commander, said that "effective measures" were urgently needed to curb the PKK, after he held his first talks with Turkish officials as a special coordinator to discuss joint action against the rebels.    

Turkey has long urged its NATO ally to crack down on PKK bases in neighbouring northern Iraq, a Kurdish-run region which the rebels use as a springboard for attacks across the border in southeast Turkey.              

Ankara charges that the PKK enjoys free movement in the region and easily obtains weapons and explosives there. It has even threatened a cross-border operation if the United States and Iraq fail to take measures.        

"We expect concrete results from our cooperation (with the US) as soon as possible," Turkish foreign ministry undersecretary Ali Tuygan said.   

Tuesday's attack is likely to put further strain on the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which has come under mounting criticism for failing to stop bloodshed in the southeast at a time when stability is crucial for Turkey's bid to join the EU.