Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu announced Thursday he would step down as ruling party chief at an extraordinary party congress on May 22, meaning he would also quit as premier.

"I declare that we will hold our congress on May 22," Davutoglu told reporters in Ankara after a meeting of the central committee of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).

Visa-free travel for Turkish citizens to the European Union can herald a "new page" in Ankara's relations with the bloc, Turkey's foreign minister said Wednesday, after the European Commission gave conditional backing to the move.

"In addition to being a turning point for visa free travel for our citizens... this decision is a new page in the process ahead of us in relations with the European Union," Mevlut Cavusoglu told reporters in Ankara.

Berlin-based newspaper die tageszeitung published a German-Turkish edition on Tuesday, World Press Freedom Day, that denounced media censorship under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and European silence about it.

The 16-page special edition entitled "Uncensored / Sansursuz" was produced jointly with Turkish weekly Agos and BirGun daily and featured stories with headlines including "What is the (Turkish) government hiding?"

One Turkish soldier was killed and 20 others were wounded when a car bomb blamed on Kurdish militants exploded in the Kurdish-majority southeast, the army said on Monday.

In a statement, the army said a total of 23 people were wounded in the blast which took place late on Sunday, 20 of them soldiers and three of them civilian family members.

Three Turkish soldiers were killed and 14 others wounded in an attack Sunday in the Kurdish-dominated southeast blamed on militants from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), the army said.

The attack took place in the Nusaybin district of Mardin province, where the army has been conducting a military operation backed by a curfew against the PKK, it said.

A car bomb on Sunday hit the Turkish city of Gaziantep, a major refugee hub near the Syrian border, killing at least two policemen and wounding 22 other people, with the country on edge after a succession of militant attacks.

In a separate attack in the province of Mardin to the east, three Turkish soldiers died in an ambush by Kurdish militants who have killed hundreds of members of the security forces in a renewed insurgency since last year.

Al-Mustaqbal movement chief MP Saad Hariri held a meeting on Saturday with Turkish Prime Minister Ahmed Davutoglu where talks focused on the developments in the region and Lebanon, his media office reported.

After the meeting Hariri said: “We discussed the situation in Lebanon and the region particularly the violations of the recent armistice agreement in Syria. There is no doubt that everyone is on alert at this stage.”

Turkish prosecutors have demanded up to five years jail for a British university lecturer based in Istanbul on charges of making "terror propaganda" for outlawed Kurdish militants, reports said Friday.

Chris Stephenson, who teaches computer science at Bilgi University in Istanbul, was briefly arrested in mid March while protesting outside the city's main courthouse over the detention of four Turkish academics who are being tried on similar charges.

A female suicide bomber who blew herself up in the center of one of Turkey's most historic cities this week was linked to Kurdish militants and had also fought in Syria against jihadists, a report said Friday.

There was no fingerprint evidence available from the remains of the woman who blew herself up in front of a mosque in the former Ottoman capital of Bursa on Wednesday but she has now been identified after DNA testing, the Hurriyet daily said.

A meeting of a top committee at the Turkish parliament broke up in chaos on Thursday as deputies threw punches and jumped onto tables in a furious confrontation between ruling party and pro-Kurdish lawmakers.

The constitutional committee of parliament was meeting to discuss a government-backed plan to remove the parliamentary immunity of deputies that has already seen tensions surge.