Female suicide bomber kills two in eastern Turkey

AFP - A woman blew herself up and killed two other people Saturday near a ruling party building in the eastern Turkish town of Bingol, the local governor told AFP.

The attack, the first of its kind in a year, took place near the provincial headquarters of the Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP), Mustafa Hakan Guvencer said.

Several people were also wounded in the attack, which came as eastern Turkey was winding up rescue efforts a week after a devastating earthquake and two days after the end of punishing military raid against Kurdish separatists.

The Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK), whose decades-old struggle against the central government escalated in recent weeks, has carried out such attacks in the past but there was no immediate claim for Saturday's suicide blast.

Interior Minister Idris Naim Sahin, quoted by the Anatolia news agency, had earlier reported a toll of 10 wounded and stressed that the local AKP office was not specifically targeted.

"It happened near the provincial headquarters but it wasn't directly targeted," he said.

The last such attack took place in November 2010 in Istanbul, where a bomber blew himself up on the central Taksim square, wounding 32 people.

The attack in Bingol comes two days after the Turkish military wrapped up a week-long air and land operation against the PKK in southeastern Turkey and across the Iraqi border.

The sweeping operation came after a series of PKK attacks against government forces caused the Turkish army's biggest loss in almost two decades.

The PKK, listed as a terrorist organisation by Turkey and much of the international community, took up arms for Kurdish independence in southeastern Turkey in 1984, sparking a conflict that has claimed some 45,000 lives.