Bomb attack kills Turkish governor

  • 11/11/2016
He died at a hospital in the city of Gaziantep on Friday morning (Reuters / file)
He died at a hospital in the city of Gaziantep on Friday morning (Reuters / file)

A Turkish district governor has died in hospital after he was wounded in a bomb attack on his office in the largely Kurdish southeast.

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, the Dogan news agency said.

Safiturk had been given the additional responsibility in July of running the municipality as part of moves to replace elected officials from the Democratic Regions' Party, a sister party of the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party.

Ankara accuses the HDP, parliament's third-biggest party, of links to the PKK, which is fighting for autonomy in the largely Kurdish southeast.

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 2015.

Reuters