Turkish aircraft attacked a group of Kurdish guerrillas in northern Iraq yesterday as they tried to sneak across the border into Turkey, the military said today.

The Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) forces were “neutralised” in the Avasin-Basyan region of northern Iraq, a statement by Turkey's General Staff said today, without detailing whether there had been any casualties.

The PKK denied that anyone had been killed. “Yesterday there was an hour of bombing by Turkish forces in the Zagros Mountains. There were no casualties among the PKK,” a spokesman, Ahmed Danees, said.

The Turkish military said that it also clashed with PKK fighters inside southeast Turkey in two separate incidents yesterday that left one rebel dead.

Ankara says that thousands of the separatist rebels use a remote, mountainous part of northern Iraq as a base from which to stage attacks on targets inside Turkey.

The Turkish Army staged an eight-day ground incursion against the PKK in February, sending thousands of troops into Iraq. Some 240 of the Kurdish forces were killed in the campaign, along with 27 Turkish soldiers, according to the military.

The cross-border operation raised fears in Baghdad, Washington and London that one of Iraq's relatively safe regions would also become destablised.

The Turkish Government blames the PKK for the deaths of nearly 40,000 people, mostly Kurds, since the rebel group began its armed campaign for an ethnic homeland in southeast Turkey in 1984. Turkey, like the European Union and the United States, considers the PKK a terrorist organisation.

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