The bomb, planted at the entrance of the regional headquarters of the center-left Republican People's Party in Diyarbakir, the main city of the predominantly Kurdish southeast, damaged the building, but caused no casualties, officials said.

Police sources said it was most probably a percussion bomb, designed to make loud noise rather than kill.

There was no immediate word about the perpetrators.

Diyarbakir is a hotbed of Kurdish militancy and the rebel Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) has carried out similar attacks here in the past.

Earlier, the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (TAK), a shadowy group believed to be a front for the PKK, claimed responsibility for two bombs that exploded almost simultaneously outside a bank in the southern city of Adana on Friday.

The statement, posted on the group's web site, said the attacks were a reprisal "for the fascist treatment of Chairman Apo and our people."

Apo is the nickname of Abdullah Ocalan, the jailed leader of the PKK, which has waged a bloody campaign for Kurdish self-rule in the southeast since 1984.

TAK said the Oyakbank branch was targeted because it was affiliated to the army and threatened more violence.

Oyakbank is owned by the Turkish military's pension fund.

The first explosion occurred near a cash point of Oyakbank and was followed six minutes later by a second blast at a nearby construction site.

Seventeen people, including eight policemen and two cadets from the local police academy, were injured.

Turkish officials say TAK is a front for PKK attacks on civilian targets; the PKK claims TAK is a splinter group over which it has no control.

TAK has claimed 10 other bomb attacks in urban centers across Turkey this year, in which six people were killed and some 120 others injured.

The deadliest of them was at the Mediterranean resort of Manavgat, in which three foreign tourists and a Turk perished.

The Kurdish conflict in Turkey has claimed more than 37,000 lives since the PKK, blacklisted as a terrorist group by Ankara and much of the international community, took up arms in 1984.