SOFIA —
Bulgaria has detained five people accused of having helped one of the suspects
in last weekend’s bombing in central Istanbul, which killed six people,
prosecutors said Saturday.
اضافة اعلان
The latest arrests come a day after Turkey took 17
suspects into custody over last Sunday’s blast, which Ankara has blamed on the
outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
The victims include two girls aged nine and 15.
“Five people have been charged” over their
“logistical” help aiding one of the suspects to flee, Siyka Mileva, a spokeswoman
for the Sofia prosecutor’s office told AFP.
Two of those detained are “Syrian Kurds” — a woman
and a 31-year-old man called Amran Abdulrami who was the main suspect,
Bulgaria’s chief prosecutor Ivan Geshev told AFP. All five were detained on Wednesday.
The three others are “Moldovan nationals from the
Gagauz minority”, a Turkic-Christian group, Geshev added. Turkey has sought the
extradition of some of the suspects.
Geshev said the suspects were also accused of human
trafficking at the Bulgaria-Turkey border with the help of Bulgarian public
sector workers.
A Sofia court later on Saturday formally took four
of the suspects into custody but the prosecutor did not ask for the woman under
investigation to be kept in detention.
Local media reported she had been released.
A court statement said the link to the Istanbul
attack remained to be proven. “The only link is a mobile phone that one of the
suspects had used to contact one of the perpetrators of the attack,” it said.
Abdulrami’s lawyer said his client rejected the
allegations and would appeal against his detention.
The PKK and its
Syrian offshoot, the YPG, have
denied involvement in the blast, which also wounded 81 people. No individual or
group has claimed responsibility for the attack.
Turkish police arrested the chief suspect Alham
Albashir — a Syrian woman said to have been working for Kurdish militants — in
an Istanbul suburb.
Albashir reportedly confessed to planting the bomb
during her interrogation.
The Istanbul court remanded the 17 suspects in
pre-trial detention on charges of “destroying national unity” and “deliberate
killing”.
Albashir said she joined the PKK because of her
boyfriend’s influence and maintained her ties to the group after she broke up
with him, the Turkey’s Anodolu news agency said.
The attack was the deadliest in five years and
evoked memories of a wave of nationwide bombings from 2015 to 2017 that were
blamed mostly on Kurdish militants and Daesh terrorists.
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