Lieutenant Colonel Alim Yilmaz and a private were killed Saturday when their car drove over a landmine activated by remote control on a rural road in southeastern Elazig province.

The colonel in command of the regional gendarmerie, apparently the primary target of the attack, was also in the vehicle, but escaped with injuries from the blast, blamed on the separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).

The attack was the latest episode in almost daily bloodshed in the region over the past few weeks that has seen deadly Kurdish riots in urban areas and increasing clashes between PKK militants and the army in the countryside.

Senior government ministers, political party leaders and hundreds of army officers attended Monday's funeral at the Kocatepe mosque, the biggest in Ankara.

"Down with the PKK," "The motherland cannot be divided," the crowd chanted, waving Turkish flags.

An angry mourner shouted at Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, present at the ceremony, to toughen anti-terror laws, drawing loud applause from the crowd.

The PKK is blacklisted as a terrorist group by Ankara, the European Union and the United States.

The recent wave of violence has raised fears of renewed ethnic conflict at a time when stability is critical to Turkey's bid to join the EU, with which it began membership talks in October.

The Kurdish conflict has claimed more than 37,000 lives since 1984, when the PKK took up arms for self-rule in southeast Turkey.

The region enjoyed relative calm between 1999 and 2004, when the PKK proclaimed a unilateral ceasefire, and Ankara, eager to boost its EU bid, enacted a series of reforms to expand Kurdish cultural freedoms.

The government has vowed to continue fighting the PKK without backtracking on its democratization program.