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| Europe | |
| Soldiers, train driver hurt in blasts in Turkey | |
| 2004-08-30 | |
| Ten soldiers and a train driver were wounded in mainly Kurdish southeastern Turkey on Sunday in two road explosions blamed on Kurdish rebels, officials and media reports said. The incidents were the latest in a string of deadly attacks thought to have been carried out by militants from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), now known as KONGRA-GEL, which has ended a five-year unilateral ceasefire with Ankara. The soldiers were injured when the military vehicle they were travelling in hit a mine on a road in the province of Sirnak, the CNN-Turk news channel reported. Earlier in the day, a blast on a railroad in the nearby province of Bingol caused a freight train to derail and left one of its drivers injured. The explosion occurred when the train ran over either a mine or a bomb planted on the tracks. "The initial information we have is that a bomb planted on the tracks exploded. One of the drivers was injured," a spokesman for Turkey's state-run railway authority, Mehmet Ayci, told AFP. Bingol Governor Vehbi Avuc, however, told Anatolia news agency that a mine caused the explosion. Security forces in the region launched an operation to hunt down the assailants, who were thought to be Kurdish militants, local security sources said. Two people were seriously injured in the province of Siirt on Saturday when their truck ran over a mine, just a day after two people were killed and five injured when their van hit a mine in the same area. Since calling-off its ceasefire on June 1, the PKK has been blamed for a series of deadly attacks in the southeast as well as the bombing of two hotels in Istanbul earlier this month, which left two people dead and 11 others, mostly foreign tourists, injured. The rebels have threatened more attacks across the country.
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| Posted by:Steve White |