The exiled Muslim cleric at the heart of a bitter feud with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan Monday denied allegations that he was behind a vast graft scandal roiling the government.

In his first broadcast interview since he arrived in the United States in 1999, Fethullah Gulen told the BBC that he was not behind the corruption probe that has ensnared Erdogan's key allies.

A spokesman for Turkey's Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) was killed and seven others were wounded in an attack on one of the far-right movement's campaign offices in Istanbul, media reports said Monday.

The attack took place late Sunday in the working class Esenyurt district shortly after the office's inauguration ahead of local polls due in March, the Dogan news agency reported.

Turkey on Friday sought to reassure investors at the World Economic Forum in Davos over the health of the economy despite the Turkish lira hitting new lows on political turmoil.

Deputy Prime Minister Ali Babacan told the assembled global elite that despite recent volatility on the currency markets, investors were not rushing to pull their money out.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday offered to freeze several parts of a controversial justice reform bill in the face of widespread opposition.

The move comes as parliament was set for a possible vote later Friday on the legislation, which aims to exert greater government control of the Supreme Board of Judges and Prosecutor.

A Turkish court on Friday rejected a retrial request by dozens of people including former army chiefs, lawyers and journalists convicted in 2012 over an alleged coup plot.

Lawyers filed the request this month after the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan suggested it was open to the retrials of hundreds of army officers despite its long campaign to curb the once all-powerful military.

A brawl erupted in the Turkish parliament on Thursday as a heated debate on controversial judicial reforms turned nasty.

The deputy leader of the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP), Bulent Tezcan, was injured and taken to hospital as fists flew in the assembly.

At least 21 people were killed on Thursday during a bus accident in central Turkey, a local governor said.

The bus tipped over after sliding on an icy road in a town in the Kayseri province, governor Orhan Duzgun told Turkish television.

Turkey launched a mass new purge of the police and judiciary on Wednesday as parliament debates controversial reforms that have heightened the crisis engulfing Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Around 470 police were sacked or reassigned in the capital Ankara alone, NTV television reported, in the latest fallout from a corruption scandal targeting several top politicians and business leaders including Erdogan allies.

Turkey has reassigned almost 100 prosecutors and judges in a new purge as parliament began a debate on controversial government legislation to rein in the judiciary, local media reported Wednesday.

The Supreme Board of Judges and Prosecutors (HSYK) removed 96 judges and prosecutors from their posts, including five chief prosecutors and senior figures who oversaw the trials of hundreds of top military officers convicted of plotting against the government.

Syria's Kurds named a municipal council Tuesday for one of three majority-Kurdish regions in the country's northeast, two months after they declared self-rule, an official said.

"We have named a municipal government for the Jazeera area," Saleh Muslim, head of the Democratic Union Party (PYD), told Agence France Presse.