By SELCAN HACAOGLU

ANKARA, Turkey (AP) - Kurdish protesters armed with firebombs and stones battled with Turkish police Wednesday to mark the seventh anniversary of guerrilla leader Abdullah Ocalan's capture.

Dozens of demonstrators threw rocks and firebombs at riot police who tried to disperse the demonstrators in the southeastern town of Cizre in Turkey's mainly Kurdish southeast. Police fired tear gas and warning shots in the air to disperse them.

TV footage from the Dogan News Agency showed demonstrators pelting an armored police car with rocks. Police detained at least seven protesters in Cizre, reports said.

The protesters in Cizre were particularly angry over news that Ocalan's lawyers were not allowed to see their client on Wednesday.

In other violence elsewhere, Kurdish protesters smashed the windows of a city bus and clashed with police in the Mediterranean port city of Mersin.

A small bomb exploded outside a military housing complex in the southeastern town of Batman. No one was injured in the blast.

Militants believed to be linked to Ocalan's autonomy-seeking Kurdistan Workers Party have claimed responsibility for two bombings in the past week that killed one person and wounded 30 in Istanbul, Turkey's largest city.

In Sanliurfa, a city in Turkey's mainly Kurdish southeast, at least 500 demonstrators marched to protest Ocalan's imprisonment, chanting slogans in support of the rebel leader. The demonstrators unfurled banners of the outlawed group and carried posters of Ocalan. The group dispersed when riot police showed up.

Ocalan was captured in Kenya after he was forced to leave a Greek diplomatic mission there in 1999. Ocalan was later sentenced to death for leading an insurgency in Turkey's predominantly Kurdish southeast that has claimed some 37,000 lives since 1984. His sentence was later commuted to life in prison, which he is serving out as the sole inmate on a prison island near Istanbul.

Elsewhere in Turkey's southeast, shopkeepers shuttered their stores in the cities of Van, Hakkari, and the town of Dogubayazit in protest Wednesday, the Anatolia news agency said.

Kurdish protesters also staged sit-ins in the Mediterranean port city of Mersin and the southeastern city of Sirnak.

On Tuesday, more than 1,000 Kurds marched in the streets of Diyarbakir, the largest city in the southeast. Using Ocalan's nickname, they shouted, ``Long Live Apo!''

Ocalan's rebel group, which the U.S. and European Union have branded a terrorist organization, has been fighting Turkish troops for Kurdish autonomy in the southeast since 1984.

Turkey continues to fight the rebels and does not recognize the country's sizable Kurdish population as an official minority.