Two Police Officers Killed By PKK In Diyarbakır Laid To Rest

Funerals were held on Sunday to bid farewell to two police officers who were killed in an attack carried out by terrorist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) members in Diyarbakır province on Saturday morning.

Two police officers died and one more was injured after PKK terrorists shot at them from a vehicle at around 11 a.m. on Saturday when police officers from counterterrorism unit stopped the vehicle to search it.

According to a statement released by the Ministry of Interior Affairs later the same day, police officer Ahmet Çiftaslan died on the spot, while two others -- Cengiz Erdur and Sinan Tabur -- were injured. Erdur died later on Saturday while he was being treated in Dicle University Faculty of Medicine Hospital. Tabur is still in the hospital.

A funeral ceremony for the slain police officers was held in the Diyarbakır Police Department's courtyard early on Sunday. Among those who attended the ceremony were Diyarbakır Governor Hüseyin Aksoy, 7th Corps Commander Lt. Gen. İbrahim Yılmaz, Diyarbakır Chief Public Prosecutor Ramazan Solmaz and Diyarbakır Police Chief Adnan Taşdan.

The bodies of the officers were sent to their hometowns after the ceremony in Diyarbakır. Erdur was buried following a funeral prayer performed in Mevlana Mosque in the eastern province of Elazığ. Çiftaslan's body was taken to the southern Kahramanmaraş province to be buried.

The PKK attack that killed the police officers took place shortly before the shooting of Tahir Elçi, the president of the Diyarbakır Bar Association and a leading Kurdish rights activist, while he was making a statement to the press in Diyarbakır's Sur district on Saturday.

Diyarbakır Chief Public Prosecutor Solmaz offered his condolences for the slain police officers in a written statement released on the day of the attack.

A curfew was declared in Sur district following the attacks at around 1 p.m. (Cihan/Today's Zaman)