Family, friends and a large crowd of citizens bid farewell yesterday to Ahmet Budak, a member of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) gunned down by PKK militants in Turkey's Southeast on Wednesday.

Budak, who ran for a parliamentary seat in the province of Hakkari in the 2015 elections, was killed outside his home in the district of Şemdinli in front of his 12-year-old son Abdulsamet, in the latest atrocity by the terrorist group which has been running a campaign of violence for decades.

Funeral goers marched to Budak's home amid slogans denouncing the PKK while family members of the late politician wailed. Young Abdulsamet carried a placard reading a verse from Qur'an which roughly translates, "Allah is Lord of Retribution."

Budak, a contractor, ran for the AK Party as the first-place candidate in the Nov. 1 elections but lost.

His killing comes at a time of escalated violence by the terrorist group, which claims to fight for Kurdish self-rule in southeastern Turkey. In bombings and armed attacks, the PKK have killed more than 600 security personnel as well as civilians, mainly in the southeast where it draws support from hostile members of the ethnic Kurdish population. Turkey recently stepped up counterterror operations to stamp out the PKK presence in the region as well as in Northern Iraq, a few kilometers south of Hakkari, where the senior cadres of the terrorist group are hiding out in mountainous territory.

The AK Party, in power since 2002, was credited with ending the PKK violence thanks to a reconciliation process to address the Kurdish community's problems but the terrorist group resumed its attacks last year. On Sept. 12, a suspected PKK bombing injured more than 50 people gathered in and around the local offices of the party in the eastern city of Van for a convention during a Muslim holiday.