17 Turkish soldiers were killed and 27 people were wounded on Sunday when suspected Kurdish militants detonated a car bomb that ripped through a checkpoint near a police station in the country's southeast, security sources said.
The blast hit the Durak gendarmerie station, 20 km (12 miles) from the town of Semdinli, in a mountainous part of Hakkari province near the border with Iraq and Iran, where Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants are active.
Soldiers looked on as locals wandered amid mangled wreckage and debris from the explosion at a checkpoint where vehicle searches are conducted, video footage on CNN Turk showed.
Authorities were on high alert for possible attacks on Sunday, 18 years to the day since PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan fled Syria before being captured by Turkish special forces in February the following year.
He has since been in prison on an island near Istanbul.
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