Explosion in Sanliurfa kills two; Turkey arrests 26 suspects
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region (Kurdistan24) – A car bomb attack on Friday night killed two, including a 10-year-old child, and wounded 18 others in Viransehir, a town in the Kurdish-majority province of Sanliurfa in southern Turkey.
It was not immediately clear who the perpetrators of the explosion were as the Sanliurfa Governor Gungor Azim Tuna said he thought the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) was responsible.
The violence, targeting apartments where judges and prosecutors reside, took place at 9:45 p.m. local time, said Kurdistan24’s Diyarbakir bureau.
The attack burnt down scores of cars and tore down nearby building’s walls.
The private-owned Dogan news agency, citing security sources, reported one ton of explosives were used in the blast.
No group has claimed responsibility for the attack yet.
However, both the PKK-affiliated Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (TAK) and the Islamic State (IS) that controls large swathes of territory in Iraq and Syria have conducted deadly attacks on civilian targets in Turkey.
The governorate said police arrested 26 suspects in the provinces of Sanliurfa and Mardin about the explosion, including the owner of the car.
The blast in Viransehir (Wêranşar in Kurdish) whose urban population is about 100,000 is the first in Turkey in over six weeks since the Izmir attack that killed four, among them two TAK perpetrators.
Before that, an Uzbek IS militant Abdulgadir Masharipov killed 39 people and injured 70 others at an elite Istanbul nightclub in the first hours of the new year, as celebrators from Turkey and Middle Eastern countries welcomed 2017.
Editing by Karzan Sulaivany