One dead, 10 injured in Kurdish clashes in Turkey

One thousand Kurdish protesters set fire to two banks yesterday and youths set up barricades in a town in south eastern Turkey where violent clashes with security forces this week have killed eight people.

Security sources said one protester died in the latest clashes in Kiziltepe and 10 people were injured. The latest death brought the toll in this week's violence - Turkey's worst civil unrest in decades - to eight dead.

Riots erupted on Tuesday after funeral ceremonies for 14 members of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) killed last weekend by security forces.

Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said late on Friday children were being used as "pawns of terrorism" in unrest gripping the Turkey's southeast and warned that security forces could not guarantee their safety. He accused those behind the riots of trying to split the country, saying, "We shall never allow anyone to perform surgery on the unitary structure of our country".

The latest clashes erupted near the Syrian border in Kiziltepe, a town of around 100,000 people south of the mainly Kurdish region's largest city Diyarbakir, where most of this week's violence has been focused.

About 1,000 demonstrators set fire to the branches of at least two major banks and a building used by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). Youths set up barricades with rubbish bins and rocks on one street corner as armoured vehicles patrolled up and down the road. A mechanical digger cleared debris from the main street.

One traffic circle army marksman crouched with rifles and observed the youths from a distance.

Several protesters threw stones at a Reuters cameraman trying to film the demonstration. Turkey's southeast suffers high unemployment and many Kurds want political autonomy and more cultural freedoms. They feel the state is hostile to them and express sympathy for the PKK.

Ankara regards the PKK as a terrorist group responsible for the deaths of more than 30,000 people since it launched its armed campaign for an ethnic homeland in southeast Turkey in 1984.

A 3-year-old boy died of gunshot wounds on Friday in Diyarbakir and local media said he was killed after police fired shots over the heads of protesters. Three children have died since the clashes erupted earlier this week.