Suicide Bombing In Turkey

(AP)  A suicide bomber believed to be a Kurdish rebel detonated a bomb Saturday, killing himself and wounding two police officers.

Authorities stepped up security across Turkey, fearing more attacks timed to the Kurdish New Year.

The policemen tried to stop the bomber as he approached a police station in the southeastern province of Van. The bomb went off, lightly wounding the officers and a passerby.

Police in the province of Sirnak managed to foil a second attack, stopping and arresting a rebel before she set off two grenades strapped to her waist.

Authorities already have intensified security around the country after a spate of violent attacks following last month's arrest in Kenya of Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan.

Ocalan had led a nearly 15-year-old war for autonomy for Kurds in Turkey's southeast. The conflict has killed 37,000 people.

Ocalan is now in an island prison awaiting trial on treason charges.

Even greater vigilance has been ordered in anticipation of a surge of assaults on Sunday, when Kurds celebrate Nowruz, the arrival of spring and their new year.

For Kurds, the festival is an occasion to assert their cultural identity. Past festivities have ended in bloody riots that claimed dozens of lives.

Authorities warned that celebrations would not be allowed in past trouble spots in the southeast, including Diyarbakir, Batman, Sirnak and Mardin provinces.

Security forces stopped cars going into cities in the region, searching vehicles and checking the riders' IDs.

Police and the public were told to watch out for women who looked pregnant: an occasional disguise of women rebels carrying bombs.

In Mardin province, police extinguished a traditional Nowruz fire lit by children in the town of Kiziltepe.

Kurds celebrate the Nowruz, the Farsi word for new year, on March 21, along with peoples in Iran and many central Asian Turkic republics.

They sing songs and jump over the flames of burning car tires, symbolically burning away the impurities and memories of the past.

Ocalan's Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, released a statement in Athens, pledging to press on with its battle for Kurdish autonomy.

"Against the genocidal war waged by the Turkish colonizers, our party and people will resist with greater determination and doggedness," the statement said.

On Saturday, police searched a number of premises of the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democracy Party and pro-Kurdish cultural centers in Istanbul, detaining more than 30 people, the semiofficial Anatolia news agency said.

Istanbul has borne the brunt of a series of attacks blamed on Kurdish groups trying to avenge Ocalan's capture.

Most of the attacks have been firebombings. The deadliest of the arson attacks killed 13 people in a popular downtown department store earlier this month.

By Selcan Hacaoglu