ISTANBUL, Turkey — Turkey on Monday accused
a Syrian woman of planting a bomb that killed six people in Istanbul, blaming
the outlawed
Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) of carrying out the attack.
اضافة اعلان
Two girls, aged nine and 15, were among those killed
when the bomb exploded shortly after 4pm on Sunday in Istiklal Avenue, home to
smart boutiques and European consulates. More than 80 other people were
wounded.
“The person who
planted the bomb has been arrested,” Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu said in a
statement broadcast by the official Anadolu news agency early Monday.
“According to our findings, the PKK terrorist
organization is responsible,” Soylu said.
The PKK, blacklisted as a terrorist group by
Ankara and its Western allies, has waged a deadly insurgency for Kurdish self-rule in
southeastern Turkey since the 1980s.
It denied any role in the latest attack.
“There is no relationship between the PKK and yesterday’s
explosion in Istanbul,” the group’s spokesman told AFP.
A Turkish official told AFP that initial findings
point to “units within a youth organization affiliated with the PKK”.
Police, quoted by private NTV television, said the
chief suspect is a Syrian woman working for Kurdish militants. Forty-six people
were detained in total, police said.
Police footage shared with Turkish media showed a
young woman in a purple sweatshirt being apprehended in an Istanbul flat.
Police, cited by NTV, named her as Alham Albashir
and said she was arrested at 2:50am in an Istanbul suburb. Local media said she
was a trained PKK intelligence operative and 23 years old.
Turkey buried the victims on Monday.
There has been no claim of responsibility.
Justice minister
Bekir Bozdag told A Haber
television that a woman had been sitting on a bench for more than 40 minutes,
“then she got up”, leaving a bag.
“One or two minutes later, an explosion occurred,”
he said.
On Monday, all the benches had been removed from
Istiklal Avenue, where residents laid red carnations at the scene of the blast,
some wiping away tears and others speaking of their fear of further attacks in
the run-up to elections next June.
Istiklal Avenue was previously targeted during a
campaign of nationwide bombings in 2015–16 that were blamed mostly on Daesh and
outlawed Kurdish militants, killing nearly 500 people and wounding more than
2,000.
On Sunday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan
denounced the “vile attack” that had the “smell of terror” shortly before
leaving for the G20 summit on the Indonesian resort island of Bali.
Regularly targeted by Turkish military operations,
the PKK has also been at the heart of a tussle between Sweden and Turkey, which
has blocked Stockholm’s bid to join
NATO since May, accusing it of leniency
towards the group.
International condemnation flooded in from across
the world, including from the US, but on Monday, Turkey said it rejected US
condolences over the attack.
Erdogan’s government has often accused Washington of
supplying weapons to Kurdish fighters in northern Syria who Ankara labels as
terror group linked to the PKK.
“We do not accept the US embassy’s message of
condolences. We reject it,” Soylu said.
“We stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our NATO ally
Turkey in countering terrorism,” said White House Press Secretary
Karine Jean-Pierre. The US embassy tweeted it was “deeply saddened by the explosion”.
President Vladimir Putin on Monday added his own
condolences in a message to Erdogan.
“We reaffirm our readiness for the closest
interaction with our Turkish partners in the fight against all forms and
manifestations of terrorism,” Putin said.
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