11 Turkish police killed in PKK suicide bombing

The outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) today claimed a suicide truck bombing on a police building in Turkey's southeast that killed 11 officers and wounded dozens more.
The blast came two days after the Turkish army launched an offensive in Syria that the government says is targeting both Islamic State (IS) jihadists and a Syrian Kurdish militia detested by Ankara.
The explosion tore the facade off the headquarters of the Turkish riot police in the town of Cizre, a bastion of PKK support just north of the Syrian border.
The local governor's office said 11 officers were killed and 78 people injured, three of them civilians. Four people were said to be in critical condition.

The state-run Anadolu news agency said the explosion took place 50 metres (yards) from the building, at a control post.
The PKK said it carried out the assault in retaliation for the "continued isolation" of the group's jailed leader Abdullah Ocalan and the "lack of information" about his welfare.

Cizre, a majority Kurdish town, has been badly hit by renewed violence between the PKK and government forces since the collapse of a ceasefire last year.
Turkish security forces have been hit by near daily PKK attacks since a two-and-a-half year truce ended in July 2015, leaving hundreds of police officers and soldiers dead.

Turkey's operation in Syria aims to push both IS and the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) militia that is fighting the jihadists out of the border area.
Ankara considers the YPG, which has links to the PKK, as a terror group bent on carving out an autonomous Kurdish region.
Speaking during the inauguration of a new bridge over the Bosphorus in Istanbul Friday, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the Cizre attack showed Turkey was "right to keep the operation in Syria broad to include all terrorist organisations".
Western media have suggested he is more intent on preventing Syrian Kurds joining up areas under their control than fighting IS.

Prime Minister Binali Yildirim rejected the allegations.
"They either know nothing about the world or else their job is to report a bare-faced lie," he told a press conference with his Bulgarian counterpart.
Ankara's hostility to the Syrian Kurdish fighters has put it at odds with its NATO ally, the United States, which supports the YPG militia in the fight against IS.