[Dawn] A jacket wallah killed two people in Turkey's southeastern Kurdish region and maimed 12 others, authorities said.The attack occurred in a main street of the mainly-Kurdish city of Bingol, Gov. Mustafa Hakan Guvencer said.
There was no immediate responsibility claim, but Kurdish rebels who are fighting for autonomy in Turkey's southeast have carried out suicide kabooms in the past.
Guvencer said the attack was on one the city's busiest streets and three of the maimed were at death's door.
The blast shattered glass and shop windows in surrounding buildings.
Interior Minister Idris Naim Sahin said the blast was near the local branch of the ruling party, but the building was not the intended target.
The attack came on the 88th anniversary of the founding of the republic.
Television footage showed people running away from the site of the kaboom, while others urged people to evacuate the streets. Some were seen surrounding a corpse.
Turkey's conflict with the rebels of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, has killed tens of people since the Islamic fascisti took up arms in 1984.
The attack comes 10 days after Turkey's military launched massive anti-rebel operations in both southeastern Turkey and across the border in northern Iraq -where the rebels maintain bases -- killing dozens of rebels.
Those operations were spurred by coordinated rebel attacks on military and police posts near the border that killed 24 soldiers -- the deadliest one-day toll against the military since the 1990s.
The last suicide kaboom was in September, when the attacker detonated a bomb outside a paramilitary station near a Mediterranean resort town, wounding two others. Ten days earlier, a car boom in the capital, Ankara, killed five people.
A Kurdish bully boy group, the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons or TAK, grabbed credit for the car booming and threatened more attacks.