Two Kurdish militant bomb attacks ripped through a military outpost and an army vehicle on Sunday, killing seven members of the armed forces, the military said, as a conflict which flared a year ago continued to rage in south-east Turkey. It was the third such attack in the last 24 hours in the mainly Kurdish region, where a two-year-old cease-fire between the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militant group and the state collapsed last July.
Since then, thousands of PKK fighters, security force members and civilians have died in fighting across the region.
In the latest violence, a roadside bomb planted by PKK guerrillas tore through a military vehicle and killed four soldiers on the road between Semdinli and Aktutun in Hakkari province, along the border with Iraq, an army statement said.
Another soldier wounded in the attack later died, security sources said, adding army border units were put on alert and an air-backed operation was launched to find those responsible.
Further west in the town of Kiziltepe, near the Syrian border, police clashed with PKK fighters, killing two militants and capturing two more alive, other security sources said. Six police officers were wounded in the fighting.
The attacks came after reports that senior PKK commander Fehman Huseyin was killed on Friday in a bomb attack on a car in which he was travelling in north-east Syria. The report by Turkey's state-run Anadolu Agency has not been confirmed.