33 PKK militants killed in past week across Turkey: Ministry

ANKARA

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A total of 33 outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militants were killed over the past week as part of ongoing nationwide operations, according to an official statement from the Turkish Interior Ministry on April 10, state-run Anadolu Agency has reported.        

The statement said security forces conducted 456 operations against the PKK between April 3 and 10.        

It added that 43 militants were neutralized, 33 of them were killed, eight were captured alive and two others surrendered in the past week.      
  
Dozens of the suspects were also detained on charges of engaging in relations with other terrorist organizations. Some 77 were allegedly in relations with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), 1,963 with the Fetullahist Terrorist Organization (FETÖ) and the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), 76 with other groups and 570 others for aiding and abetting terrorist organizations.        

In the southeastern and eastern provinces of Batman, Bingöl, Bitlis, Diyarbakır, Mardin, Şırnak, Erzurum, Hakkari, Van, Iğdır, Siirt and Tunceli, 61 shelters and caves used by militants were destroyed and 52 hand-made explosives and mines were annihilated.       
 
Security forces also seized 107 weapons, including 68 heavy and long-barrel firearms. In addition, over one ton of explosive materials were seized.      
  
Meanwhile, more than four tons of hashish and a total of 36,571 million pills were also seized in 585 operations against drug trafficking in 73 provinces. 
       
Previously, Turkish security forces killed senior PKK militants in an operation in the southeastern province of Mardin, Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu said on April 9. 
       
At a rally with opposition Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) members in the northeastern province of Trabzon, Soylu said senior PKK members who carried out deadly terror attacks in Turkey had been killed in Mardin’s Savur district.        

He said one of them was likely an Iranian national, adding that one security forces member was slightly injured.    
    
On April 8, the Turkish General Staff said in a statement that from March 31 to April 6, 36 militants were killed in anti-PKK operations in Diyarbakır, Şırnak, Batman, Tunceli, Hakkari and Kars.