The provincial governor's office in the Cinar district of Diyarbakir region said on Thursday that an overnight attack on a police compound had left five people dead and 39 wounded.

Officials blamed the attack on the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a terrorist organization with a strong foothold in the southeastern part of Turkey. The PKK has been engaged in a decades-long insurgency against Ankara.

Turkish newspaper "Daily Sabah" reported that police personnel and civilians - including women and children - were among the wounded in the attack, which took place before dawn in Cinar's police headquarters and several adjacent buildings.

Violence intensifies

The attack began when a car bomb exploded, causing one of the nearby buildings to collapse.

The violence comes shortly after the Turkish military released a report saying that 448 members of the PKK had been killed since mid-December. That report was published the same weekend Turkish forces raided a home in eastern Van province following a tip that PKK militants were plotting a large-scale attack on government buildings.

The attack also comes two days after a suicide bomb explosion in Istanbul, which killed at least 10 people, all of them German tourists.

blc/rc (Reuters, AFP)