Ankara - Ten Kurdish separatists were reportedly killed in clashes with Turkish security forces in south-east Turkey early on Friday morning, the Dogan news agency reported.

Ankara - Police in Turkey on Thursday continued to search for the man who drove three suspected al-Qaeda gunmen to the US consulate in Istanbul where they opened fire on police.

Ankara - Two people were burnt to death and more than 40 injured in a forest fire in southern Turkey on Tuesday, NTV television reported. 

Ankara - Turkish police on Tuesday took into custody two former generals, the head of the Ankara Chamber of Commerce and more than a dozen other suspected members of a shadowy group of right-wing nationalists who are accused of plotting to bring down the government, Turkish media reported.

In dawn raids in Ankara, retired generals Hursit Tolon and Sener Eruygur were taken into custody, as was Sinan Aygun, head of the Ankara Chamber of Commerce, and Mustafa Balbay, the Ankara bureau chief of the Cumhuriyet newspaper.

Anti-terrorism police searched the houses of the four and also conducted searches of Cumhuriyet newspaper offices in Ankara and the Istanbul and Ankara offices of a pro-secularist non-governmental organization headed by Eruygur.

Ankara - Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday called on the Constitutional Court to explain its verdict last week that annulled reforms that would allow women to wear Islamic-style headscarves at universities.

Speaking for the first time since the court ruled on Thursday that constitutional amendments moved by the Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) were against the secular status of the state, Erdogan said he would wait until the court explains the decision before making a detailed reply.

Erdogan warned that Turkey was being drawn into a conflict of authority because of the ruling and the way the staunchly secular opposition was dragging its fights with the government through the courts.