The three-year-old boy was shot in the throat while watching young protesters battle security forces from the terrace of his home in Batman, southeastern Turkey, a hospital official said.

The bullet was apparently shot by a policeman firing into the air to disperse about 200 protesters, the official said.

In Istanbul a bomb planted at a bus stop killed one man and injured 13 people and a Kurdish separatist group said it carried out the attack as a reprisal for events in the southeast.

The protests there began Monday in Diyarbakir, 70 kilometres (45 miles) west of Batman. Six people, including two children, died in clashes between Kurdish protesters and Turkish security in Diyarbakir.

The mayor of Diyarbakir, Osman Baydemir, called at a news conference Friday for the protesters to "go home".

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told party officials in Ankara that "people who put their children on to the streets or give terrorist organisations the chance to use them will shed their tears in vain tomorrow."

"Our security forces will do what they have to, whoever the people serving as the instrument of terrorism may be, be they children or women," he said, according to the Anatolia news agency.

The crisis began Monday when thousands of people confronted security forces after the funerals of four of 14 PKK rebels killed by the army during fighting at the weekend.

Hundreds of Kurdish youths went on the rampage in Diyarbakir on Tuesday and Wednesday, attacking police with stones and petrol bombs and vandalizing shops and public buildings.

The violence spilled over Thursday to Batman, where the rioters fire-bombed a bank and ransacked the office of a far-right nationalist party, the Anatolia news agency said.

Besides the toddler's death Friday, a hospital official said three people had died from their injuries in hospital overnight, including a seven-year-old boy.

Three others were killed earlier in the week, including a nine-year-old boy hit by a bullet while watching from a roof.

In a nearby mountainous area, meanwhile, Anatolia reported Friday that a group of seven PKK rebels, two of them women, had died in fighting with police near the town of Silopi. It did not say when the clash occurred.

The attack on the Istanbul bus stop was claimed in an authenticated email to AFP from the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (TAK) which said it was a reprisal for repression by Ankara in the predominantly Kurdish southeast of the country.

"The fascist and colonialist Turkish state has conducted a series of murderous attacks againt our people in recent days," the message said adding that "the Kurdish people, today as yesterday, will not remain without defence. "From now on a response will follow each attack against our people with more violent actions. This time we shall not only target property but people as well," the TAK said, threatening to "turn Turkey into hell."

The police say that the TAK is a codename for the PKK, used when it carries out actions that draw international condemnation but the PKK say it is made up of elements over whom they have no control.

The conflict in southeastern Turkey has claimed some 37,000 lives since the PKK, blacklisted as a terrorist group by Ankara, the European Union and the United States, took up arms for Kurdish self-rule in 1984.