Kurdish PKK blamed by Turkiye for Istanbul’s bombing
Turkiye’s Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu has accused the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) armed group of responsibility for a bombing in a busy Istanbul street that killed six people and wounded scores.
Istanbul police said 46 people had been arrested over Sunday’s attack, including a woman suspected of having planted the bomb.
The police said Ahlam Albashir was a Syrian national and that she had confessed to being trained by the PKK. The PKK on Monday denied responsibility for the attack and no group has so far claimed it but the Turkish Interior Ministry has already accused the outlawed armed group of responsibility for Sunday’s Taksim Square bombing.
In a statement on its website, the PKK said: “It is out of [the] question for us to target civilians in any way.”
Turkiye’s Interior Minister said the order for the attack on Istiklal Avenue was given in Kobane, a city in northern Syria, where Turkish forces have carried out operations against the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia in recent years.
“According to our findings, the PKK terrorist organisation is responsible,” said Soylu.
Turkiye views the YPG as an extension of the PKK, with which it has been locked in a deadly war for three decades. Soylu said Albashir had passed through Afrin, another region in northern Syria, on her way to Istanbul.
Following his initial statement, Soylu said on Monday morning in a live television interview from Istiklal Avenue that if Albashir had not been arrested she could have escaped to Greece.
The minister also said that authorities had a phone tap showing that the PKK had ordered the killing of Albashir after the attack and that authorities had arrested the person sent to kill her.
Despite Soylu’s statements, a senior Turkish official told Reuters that authorities were not ruling out Islamic State ties to the attack.
The attack came as Ankara intensified its drone attacks and operations against the PKK leadership in Syria and Iraq, killing several people, from mid-level officials to people in the leadership, in recent months.
Kurdish PKK blamed by Turkiye for Istanbul’s bombing
There are also multiple Turkish military operations in northern Iraq, which have pushed the PKK towards the south. Meanwhile, Turkish authorities linked to support for the YPG by Washington and others to the blast.
The presidency’s communications director, Fahrettin Altun, said such attacks “are direct and indirect results of the support some countries give to terrorist organisations”.
Soylu likened the US condolences to “the murderer arriving as one of the first at the scene of the crime”
