Fresh Kurdish PKK attacks kill Turkish troops

Two Turkish troops died Monday and a policeman was killed in new attacks blamed on Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants in the country's southeast, the army and officials said.

The two soldiers died in a roadside bombing by the PKK early Monday in the Semdinli region of the southeastern Hakkari province close to the borders with Iran and Iraq, the army said in a statement.

Five other soldiers were wounded. Helicopters and drones were despatched to  "neutralise the terrorists" behind the attack, it added.

A 20-year-old policeman in the Nusaybin district of Mardin province was shot dead by suspected PKK militants while standing outside his father's house late on Sunday night, the local governor's office said.

The PKK has been staging daily attacks against the Turkish armed forces as the military keeps up air raids and operations against its strongholds in southeast Turkey as well as northern Iraq.

According to figures published Saturday by the state-run Anatolia news agency before the latest incidents, 812 PKK militants have been killed in the campaign while 56 members of the Turkish security forces have lost their lives.

Meanwhile, police detained another Kurdish mayor on allegations she had called for regional self-rule during the current security crisis.

Sevil Rojbin Cetin, mayor of Edremit in the eastern Van region, is accused of disrupting the constitutional order.

The day earlier, Turkish courts remanded in custody five mayors from the southeast on charges of seeking to destroy national unity by allegedly supporting calls for regional self-rule.

The PKK took up arms against the Turkish state in 1984 in an insurgency to seek independence for the Kurdish-dominated southeast, although its demands later moderated to autonomy and greater rights.

Tens of thousands of people have lost their lives in the conflict and the latest strife has left in tatters a 2013 ceasefire declared by the PKK's jailed leader, Abdullah Ocalan.