Turkey arrests five over deadly attack on soldiers blamed on PKK
Istanbul (AFP) - Turkey on Sunday arrested five people over the killing of three off-duty soldiers in the Kurdish-majority southeast of the country in an attack blamed on separatist militants, reports said.
The attack, the most serious act so far in an upsurge of militant violence, threatens to derail a fragile peace process between the Turkish government and the Kurds.
The three soldiers were gunned down in the middle of the afternoon Saturday while walking in the town centre of Yuksekova in the southeastern Hakkari province.
The army blamed the attack on the separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has waged a three-decade insurgency for self-rule, but has largely observed a ceasefire since March 2013.
As part of the investigation, police conducted several morning raids on addresses in Yuksekova, the official Anatolia news agency reported.
Five suspects named as Mesut K., Islam B., M.Ali A., Orhan B. and Bayram A. were arrested and being interrogated, it said.
There has been an increase in militant violence in the southeast following deadly protests earlier this month against the government's strategy to counter jihadists across the border in Syria.
On Sunday, the corpse of a village guard who had been missing since September was found tied to a telegraph post in the Tatvan district of the southeastern Bitlis region.
He had been shot dead in an execution-style killing, the army said in a statement, blaming the PKK.
Meanwhile, the army was, for a second day, blocking access to the eastern city of Tunceli amid reports a cemetery for slain PKK fighters was to be opened there.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in comments published on Sunday he believed that neither the PKK nor Turkey's main pro-Kurdish political party, the People's Democratic Party (HDP), wanted peace.
"Neither the PKK nor the party that is its extension wants peace. Two plus two equals four," Erdogan told Turkish reporters aboard his plane.
He said that Turkey's Kurdish population was happy with the ruling Justice and Development Party's (AKP's) development projects for the region, but said it was the "terror organisation" that was blocking peace efforts.
Erdogan indicated there could be a split between elements in the PKK and its overall leader Abdullah Ocalan, who is serving a life sentence on the Imrali prison island in the Sea of Marmara.
Ocalan said in a dovish statement last week that he was hopeful the peace process would be concluded successfully, remarks that contrasted with the recent surge in militant activity by the group.
"As far as I can see Imrali is also worried and made a declaration that the peace process should not be damaged," said Erdogan, avoiding referring to Ocalan by name.
Deputy Prime Minister Yalcin Akdogan, the government's pointman on the Kurdish issue, said that the PKK was having a "panic attack" in reaction to the progress made in the peace process.
"They (the PKK) fear a solution," he said, quoted by Anatolia. "But Turkey is not a country that will give way in the face of violence and terror."
