The state-run Anatolia news agency said one of the assailants was apparently wounded in a shootout after the ambush. Witnesses describe helicopters with searchlights sweeping low over the city, while police on the ground set up a broad security cordon. Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit said the identity of the attackers remains a mystery Fighting has dwindled since he was captured and sentenced to death in 1999 and rebels have scaled down their demands from self-rule to Kurdish cultural rights. Police in the southeast were most active in recent years in a crackdown against Hizbullah, an Islamist group that began targeting rebel sympathisers in the mid-1980s and has been implicated in more than 150 murders. Okkan was prominent in the operation against Hizbullah, giving press briefings as his officers raided houses and unearthed shallow graves of alleged victims of the group.
Turkey vehemently denies any such co-operation.
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