Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday denied a media report which had said that Turkish military killed over a thousand PKK terrorists in an operation conducted in Turkey and in Iraq's north, AA reported.
"The figures given by the BBC which said that 1,300-1,400 terrorists have been killed, are baseless. As the General Staff had earlier put it, within the last five days 54 terrorists have been killed inside Turkey and 200-270 others have been killed in Iraq's north," Erdogan told a joint press appearance with Azeri President Ilham Aliyev after a meeting of the High-level Strategic Cooperation Council in the western port city of Izmir.
Erdogan also joined the Turkish General Staff in denying reports that Turkish tanks crossed the border into northern Iraq as part of an extensive security operation inside Turkey as well as in northern Iraq after PKK terrorists attacked last week several targets in Cukurca town of the southeastern province of Hakkari, killing 24 soldiers and wounding 18 others.