Turkish Interior Minister Besir Atalay announced on Thursday that four people had been detained in connection with an inquiry regarding an armed attack at the United States consulate in Istanbul a day earlier that killed six people and injured other two.

Three gunmen and three police officers were shot dead in the shooting that went off at the consulate on Wednesday morning, while a fourth attacker got away in a vehicle. Two of the wounded victims were police officers who continue to be hospitalized. The assault was the first on an embassy or consulate in Turkey since 2003.

However, it remains uncertain what part the prisoners may have played in the attack, and whether any of them was the driver who had escaped from the scene. The Anatolian news agency informed that authorities found a dumped gray Ford, similar to the automobile present at the scene, in an eastern district near the airport, and were examining it.

Minister Besir Atalay said the number of detainees could rise as the inquiry developed, but declined to give details on any potential organizational connections behind the assault, which Turkish and American officials have described as a terrorist attack.

Numerous Turkish news channels have hypothesized that Al Qaeda was engaged in the attack, basing their affirmation upon the fact that at least one of the gunmen was trained in Afghanistan. NTV, a private news television, informed that Erkan Kargin, 26, one of the gunmen shot dead at the consulate, had been convicted for his connection to IBDA-C, an illicit fundamentalist grouping here.

The attack on Wednesday reawakened memories of a chain of attacks five years ago, when suicide bombers asserting connections to Al Qaeda murdered approximately 60 people and injured hundreds at the British Consulate, two synagogues, and the Istanbul headquarters of HSBC, the major British bank. Some of the attackers have acknowledged training in Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan.