Istanbul Bus Suicide Blast Injures 15 Police, 17 Civilians, Mutlu Says
Istanbul Blast Targeting Police Injures 32
Muhittin Aydogan/AFP/Getty Images
Investigators work at the scene where a suicide bomber blew himself up in cental Istanbul.
Investigators work at the scene where a suicide bomber blew himself up in cental Istanbul. Photographer: Muhittin Aydogan/AFP/Getty Images
A suicide bombing in central Istanbul injured 15 police and 17 civilians, said the city’s Governor Huseyin Avni Mutlu. Five of the policemen were “heavily injured,” he said.
The male bomber, who died in the attack, attempted to board a police minibus in Taksim Square in the Turkish city at 10:40 a.m., said Mutlu at a press conference today. It wasn’t immediately clear who was responsible for the blast, which he described as “a crime against humanity.”
The attack was an attempt to “disturb peace, destroy the stability and safety environment in Turkey, but this won’t be tolerated,” NTV television reported Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan as saying in the southern province of Mardin.
Kurdish, leftist and Islamist groups have carried out attacks in the city in the past. A country-wide cease-fire imposed by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, was scheduled to expire today. A senior commander of the group, Murat Karayilan, apologized for killing civilians and said he wants to extend the cease-fire indefinitely, Radikal newspaper reported on Oct. 28.
Turkish security forces killed two members of the PKK after they attacked a police station in the eastern city of Tunceli, Milliyet newspaper reported on Oct. 25.
Turkey’s fight against the PKK, which seeks autonomy in the country’s largely Kurdish southeast and is considered a terrorist organization by the U.S. and European Union, has led to the deaths of some 40,000 people since 1984, most of them Kurdish civilians.
To contact the reporter on this story: Seda Sezer in Istanbul at ssezer2@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Ben Holland at bholland1@bloomberg.net.
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