6 Turkish Soldiers, 3 Rebels Killed in Police Station Attack

Six Turkish soldiers and three Kurdish rebels died during an attack on a police station in the country's Kurd-dominated southeast, an official statement said on Sunday.

The Saturday evening attack in the village of Belenoluk in Siirt province also injured 11 others, the governorate said in a statement, adding that three "terrorists" perished in the gunbattle.

The Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which took up arms in Kurdish-majority southeastern Turkey in 1984, sparking a conflict that has claimed about 45,000 lives, has recently escalated attacks on Turkish targets.

On Thursday, a radical Kurdish group that Turkey says is a PKK front claimed responsibility for a bomb attack two days earlier that killed three people in the center of Ankara. The PKK says the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons is a splinter group outside its control.

Three security officials were killed in two separate attacks in east and southeast Turkey, on Wednesday and Thursday.

The successive assaults come days after the Turkish government threatened to launch a ground incursion against PKK camps in northern Iraq.

The Turkish air force has bombed suspected PKK targets repeatedly since August 17.