Forty-six, including Syrian woman accused of planting the bomb, detained for Istanbul blast
Taksim Square
Turkey's Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu accused the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) on Monday for a blast that killed six people in Istanbul's main shopping street on Sunday andinjured 81. Meanwhile, the police saidthat they have detained 46 suspects,including Syrian woman Ahlam Albashir, who is suspected to have planted the bomb.
The woman has also reportedly said that she was trained by Kurdish militants in Syria and entered Turkey through northwest Syria's Afrin region.
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"According to our findings, the PKK terrorist organisation is responsible," Suleyman Soylu said in a statement broadcast by the official Anadolu news agency in the early hours of Monday.The PKK has been blacklisted as a terrorist group by Ankara as well as its Western allies.
He further said that the order for the attack on Istiklal Avenue, a popular shopping destination, was given in the northern Syrian city of Kobani, where Turkish forces have carried out operations against the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia in recent years. Soylu added that the bomber had passed through Afrin, another region in northern Syria.
Kobani was the site of a 2015 battle between Kurdish militants and Islamic State jihadists, who were driven out after more than four months of fighting.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who reached Indonesia for the G20 summit after the attack, called the bombing a "vile attack" before leaving for the summit and said it had a "smell of terror."
No group has claimed responsibility for the attack yet.
Images of a person, who appeared to be a woman, were aired on television, leaving a package below a raised flower bed in the street. People are worried that Istanbul might once again fall victims to a series of attacks, similar to what happened between mid-2015 and 2017.
"We believe that it is a terrorist act carried out by an attacker, whom we consider to be a woman, exploding the bomb," Turkey's vice president Fuat Oktay had earlier said.
Istanbul has been a target for Kurdish, Islamist and leftist militants in the past. An offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) had claimed twin bombings outside an Istanbul soccer stadium in December 2016 that killed 38 people and wounded 155.
(With inputs from agencies)
