Turkey: soldier killed in new PKK attack

Elsewhere in Istanbul, a police officer and two suspected attackers died in the ensuing fighting after a vehicle bomb went off outside a police station.

One of the assailants of the attack at the consulate, a female who was wounded during the shoot-out with police, was later captured in an apartment nearby, media said, adding that police was searching for a second suspect, who was reportedly male.

The Turkish military ratcheted up pressure on Kurdish militants with a fresh round of air strikes in the southeast of the country on Tuesday as the insurgents claimed responsibility for the bombing of a police station in Istanbul.

Ten people, three of them police officers, were injured in the attack, which took place weeks after Turkey launched what the government described as a “synchronized war on terror”.

Police armed with automatic rifles cordoned off streets around the US consulate in Sariyer district after the gun attack. It said the attack was carried out in honor of a PKK fighter killed in a Turkish airstrike in northern Iraq.

Warplanes pounded 17 targets in the province of Hakkari on Monday and Tuesday, the military said, part of a renewed crackdown on the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) which has waged a three-decade insurgency for Kurdish autonomy. The same group once claimed responsibility for a 2013 attack on the U.S. embassy in Akara.

A consulate officials stated, “We are working with Turkish authorities to investigate the incident”.

The explosion also damaged neighbouring buildings and around 20 cars parked nearby, the private Dogan news agency reported.

It named her as Hatice Asik and said she was later arrested and taken to hospital after being shot by police.

In south-eastern Sirnak province, four police officers were killed when their armoured vehicle was hit by roadside explosives and a soldier died when Kurdish militants opened fire on a military helicopter as it was taking off.

Turkey opened its air bases to the US-led coalition against Islamic State (IS) last month after years of reluctance and carried out its own bombing raids, stepping up its role after a suspected IS suicide bomber killed 32 people in the town of Suruc near the Syrian border.

In Washington, a Pentagon spokesman, Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, said Monday that U.S. F-16 fighters brought to Turkey a day earlier were expected to begin flying combat missions “in coming days”, and that the U.S. might also bring refueling aircraft to the country’s Incirlik base at some point. State-run Anadolu news agency said on Sunday that more than 260 militants had been killed, including senior PKK figures, and more than 400 wounded by August. 1.