Seven police officers have been killed and 27 others wounded after an explosion hit a passing police vehicle in the south-eastern Turkish city of Diyarbakır, officials have said.
The blast detonated as a vehicle carrying special forces and riot police passed a bus station in the city, the largest in the mainly Kurdish south-east.
Several cars were damaged and almost all the windows of a high-rise building in the area were shattered. At least six ambulances were deployed to collect casualties, and security forces rushed to seal off the area.
Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who is on a visit to Washington for a nuclear security summit, denounced the attack.
“This shows terrorism’s ugly face again,” Erdoğan said in a speech to the Brookings Institute. “The determination of our security forces will, God willing, put an end [to it].”
The south-east has been hit by waves of violence since a ceasefire between the militant Kurdistan Workers party (PKK) and the government collapsed last July.
The prime minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu, whose government has waged a relentless campaign against PKK rebels since last summer, was due on Friday to make a rare visit to Diyarbakır.
Hundreds of security force members, rebels and civilians have been killed since the PKK resumed its more than three-decade insurgency after the truce ended.
