Kurd rebels kill officer, hurt guards in SE Turkey

TUNCELI, Turkey, Sep 25 (Reuters) Kurdish rebels killed an army officer today in Turkey's troubled southeast, security officials said, and also claimed responsibility for a weekend bombing that wounded 12 people.

The officials said members of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) killed the officer and wounded two village guards in an ambush in the province of Mardin.

Village guards are responsible for security in rural areas.

The army launched a fresh offensive against the PKK in the region, backed up by helicopter gunships, the officials said.

Separately, the PKK claimed responsibility for Saturday's truck explosion in front of a police building in eastern Turkey, which wounded three policemen and nine other people.

''The bomb attack against the police building in Igdir was carried out by PKK militants,'' it said on its website.

The injured in that attack included four visiting soccer players and their coach from Ankara.

On Monday, police in the Aegean port city of Izmir arrested a suspected PKK member and seized 9.25 kg of plastic explosives and ten fuses in his house, the state Anatolian news agency said.

It said the PKK was planning attacks on tourist resorts in the Aegean region, adding that the PKK suspect had worked as a caretaker in an apartment block housing retired army officers.

A shadowy group linked to the PKK, the Kurdistan Liberation Hawks (TAK), has claimed responsibility for past bomb attacks on tourist resorts in western Turkey, most recently in August in blasts that killed three people and wounded dozens more.

Ankara blames the PKK for the deaths of more than 30,000 people since the group launched its armed struggle for an independent Kurdish homeland in southeast Turkey in 1984.

Attacks have increased since the PKK called off a unilateral ceasefire in 2004.

Tensions have been running especially high in the southeast since a bomb killed ten people, mostly children, in the city of Diyarbakir earlier this month, sparking protests by thousands of people demanding an end to the violence.

Ankara blamed the PKK for that attack, but the rebels denied responsibility. Some local people blamed shadowy elements in the Turkish security apparatus for the bomb.

REUTERS BDP PM2142