"Two persons were killed and 26 wounded, including 18 security personnel, in confrontations" on Sunday, said the governor of Mardin, Mehmet Kiliclar, according to the Anatolia news agency.

Sporadic clashes continued on Sunday in Kiziltepe and Nusaybin, two small towns on the border with Syria where 58 people were arrested, the governor said.

In Istanbul, meanwhile, a Molotov cocktail attack set ablaze a bus late Sunday, resulting in three deaths.

A group of protestors hurled the incendiary device onto the bus in the suburb of Bagcilar. An elderly woman fleeing the burning vehicle was hit by a car and died in hospital, CNN Turk said.

Two more bodies were recovered after police removed the wreckage of the bus, which crashed into a truck, it said.

Of nine persons killed in southeastern Turkey since rioting began last Tuesday, three were children. Dozens have been injured -- especially security forces -- in this region's most serious outbreak of civil disorder in a dozen years.

Violence in Turkey's Kurdish southeast have escalated since June 2004, when the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) organization ended a unilateral ceasefire that had been in effect for five years.

The PKK has waged an armed separatist campaign against the government since 1984, with the conflict claiming some 37,000 lives.