Grenade attack near a Turkish holiday resort

Istanbul, Sept 15:) A paramilitary policeman was lightly injured in a grenade attack near a Turkish holiday resort, the state-run Anatolian news agency said today.

The assailant threw the grenade when police tried to halt two suspicious individuals for questioning yesterday in a village 20 km (12 miles) north of Marmaris, a Mediterranean resort popular with British tourists.

The attack came amid heightened security in the region after a series of bomb attacks in Marmaris at the end of last month in which 27 people were injured. A total 15 people have been killed in bombings in Turkey in the last three weeks.

Kurdish militants have claimed responsibility for the tourist resort blasts and said they were designed to undermine Turkey's vital tourism industry, which is expected to bring in revenues of billion this year.

The gendarmes, who maintain security in rural Turkey, stopped the two individuals to check their identity cards as they left a shop in Akcapinar village. They fled into a wooded area after throwing the grenade.

Security officials found a gun and a cartridge believed to belong to the assailants at the scene.

In a separate incident in the southeastern city of Gaziantep, a bomb exploded yesterday near a small police installation, damaging two cars and smashing windows but causing no injuries, Anatolian reported.

Ten people, mostly children, were killed in a bomb attack on Tuesday in the city of Diyarbakir in the mainly Kurdish southeast, far from the country's tourist regions. Nobody has claimed responsibility for that bombing.

Southeast Turkey has been the focus of a 22-year-old conflict between security forces and the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) that has claimed more than 30,000 lives.

REUTERS