Turkish police continued investigations
Tuesday into a bomb blast on Sunday in Istanbul that killed 17 people
and injured more than 150 with officials pointing the blame at the
separatist Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK), charges the PKK have denied.
As the families of the dead continued funeral preparations police
were seeking a man in a black shirt who was captured by a mobile phone
camera running down the street in Istanbul suburb of Gungoren just
seconds before the second blast hit, Yenisafak newspaper reported on
Tuesday.
A first small bomb which had been placed in a rubbish bin on a
crowded pedestrian street in the working class suburb exploded at
around 9:45 pm (1645 GMT) Sunday night and was followed by a much
larger blast around 10 to 12 minutes later and around 50 metres down
the street.
Yenisafak reported that police had raided a number of houses around
the city in their search for the attackers and that the second bomb was
made of TNT explosives.
Turkish newspapers on Tuesday concentrated on allegations that the
PKK was behind the blast, quoting Istanbul governor Muammer Guler who
said the attack seemed linked to 'the separatist organization' and
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan who said the attack could be a
reprisal for continued attacks on the PKK in the south-east and air
strikes on PKK positions in northern Iraq.
The PKK on Monday denied involvement, saying instead that the
attacks could be linked to fiercely secularist nationalists in the
so-called Ergenekon group who have allegedly been behind organized
attacks and plotted assassinations of prominent Turks with the aim of
destabilizing Erdogan's government.
Interior Minister Besir Atalay is expected to address parliament on
either Tuesday or Wednesday to give a detailed report on the
investigations.
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