The officer was wounded late Tuesday when rebels from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) opened automatic weapons fire on a police station in the town of Genc, in Bingol province.

The attack followed a wave of violence that claimed 15 lives over the past week as police clashed with Kurdish protestors in a week of riots here and in nearby towns in mainly Kurdish-populated southeast Turkey.

Police opened fire to disperse the demonstrators, many of them in their teens, who torched banks and public buildings, vandalized shops and threw molotov cocktails.

The Turkish government has accused the PKK of orchestrating the unrest that first erupted on March 28 in Diyarbakir, the biggest city of the region, after the funerals of PKK militants killed in clashes with the army.

More than 37,000 people have been killed since 1984 when the PKK, blacklisted as a terror group by Turkey, the United States and the European Union, took up arms for self-rule in southeastern Turkey.