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DIYARBAKIR, Turkey, July 26 (AFP) - 17h08 -
Police in eastern Turkey detained a suspected
Kurdish rebel bomber and an accomplice after
learning that the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK)
was planning a bomb attack during a local festival,
officials said Tuesday.
The 25-year-old man was arrested late Monday in his
house in a village in Tunceli province, where police
seized one kilogram (2.2 pounds) of C4 plastic
explosives and other materials used to make bombs,
the officials said.
A second man believed to be an accomplice was also
detained during the raid.
The pair were indicted by a local court and jailed
Tuesday, the officials said, but did not elaborate
on the charges.
Citing security reasons, the authorities on Monday
postponed for 45 days a cultural festival that was
scheduled to begin this week. The event attracts
thousands of people each year to predominantly
Kurdish Tunceli.
The PKK, branded a terrorist organization by the
United States and the European Union, has fought
Ankara since 1984 and recently stepped up violence
in the country's mainly Kurdish southeast.
In a separate incident in Tunceli, security forces
Tuesday discovered C4 explosives planted on a road
outside a village the provincial governor was
scheduled to visit Wednesday, the Anatolia news
agency reported.
"This was a plan to attack me," Governor Mustafa
Erkal told Anatolia.
In Gumushane, in northeastern Turkey, a policeman
and a civilian were wounded late Monday in an armed
attack on a police vehicle which officials blamed on
the PKK.
"We have no doubt that it was a terrorist attack,"
Gumushane Governor Veysel Dalmaz told Anatolia. "We
see the PKK as the prime suspect."
Gumushane is not a region where the group is usually
active, but Dalmaz said a group of PKK militants who
came north from Tunceli were trying to establish
themselves in the province.
In the eastern province of Mus, a bomb planted on
tracks near a railway station was set off by remote
control on Tuesday, derailing five carriages of a
mail train but cuasing no injuries, Anatolia
reported.
In Bingol province in the east, a military vehicle
on the way to a village was damaged when it ran over
a mine believed to have been planted by
"terrorists", the word officials use to denote the
PKK.
No one was injured in the explosion.
The PKK has stepped up violence in the southeast
over the past several months, after it called off a
five-year unilateral ceasefire in June 2004 on
grounds that reforms by Ankara to expand Kurdish
freedoms were inadequate.
The police has blamed the PKK for a bomb attack in
the popular seaside resort of Kusadasi earlier this
month which killed five people including foreign
tourists.
The Kurdish conflict in Turkey has claimed some
37,000 lives since 1984, when the PKK took up arms
against Ankara to fight for Kurdish self-rule.
AFP
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