Four people died and 52 others were injured on Sunday in election-related violence in Turkey as the country held local polls, security sources and media reports said.

One man was shot dead and 12 others were wounded in the small village of Akziyaret, in Sanliurfa province in the mainly Kurdish southeast of the country, as supporters of rival candidates for village headman attacked each other, the sources said.

A similar gunfight left one person dead and ten others wounded in the village of Siginak, near the southeastern city of Diyarbakir, while another was shot dead in Kagizman town, in the eastern province of Kars, they added.

In a suburb of Diyarbakir, a candidate vying to run the neighbourhood administration died of a heart attack during a heated argument with voters.

Thirty other people were injured in separate fights in the towns of Suruc and Akcakale, both of them in Sanliurfa, as well as in Igdir province in the east and in the central Anatolian province of Afyon, the Anatolia news agency reported.

Some 48 million people are eligible to vote in Sunday's elections to elect about 93 000 local representatives in the country's 81 provinces.

Polls predict that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Justice and Development Party will win a solid victory.

AFP