A Turkish district governor wounded in a bomb attack on
his office in the largely Kurdish southeast has died in hospital,
the state-run Anadolu Agency and other media said on
Friday.
Suspected Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants carried out
Thursday's attack in the Derik district of Mardin province with an
improvised explosive device, wounding three people, according to
the Mardin governor's office.
Derik district governor Muhammed Fatih Safiturk was one of three
people hurt in the attack, suffering second-degree burns. He died
at a hospital in the city of Gaziantep on Friday morning, having
been flown there by helicopter for treatment, the Dogan news agency
said.
Safiturk had been given the additional responsibility in July of
running the local municipality as part of a series of moves to
replace elected officials from the Democratic Regions' Party (DBP),
a sister party of the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party
(HDP).
Ankara accuses the HDP, parliament's third biggest party, of
links to the PKK, which is fighting for autonomy in the largely
Kurdish southeast. The HDP denies any direct links and says it is
working for a peaceful resolution of the conflict.
There was no claim of responsibility for Thursday's attack but
the PKK often carries out bomb and rocket attacks in the southeast,
where violence has raged since a two-year-old PKK ceasefire
collapsed in July last year.
More than 40,000 people have been killed in the conflict since
the PKK took up arms in 1984. It is considered a terrorist group by
Turkey, the United States and the European Union.