There are no foreigners among the six victims of the attack carried out yesterday in Istanbul . The bomb that exploded in the center of the Turkish capital caused the death of a married couple, a mother and daughter, a father and daughter, all of Turkish nationality; 81 are injured, 50 have been discharged and 31 are in hospital, two in serious condition.
In the last few hours there have been several arrests, it seems over 20.
"According to our assessments, the order for the deadly terrorist attack came from Ayn al-Arab (Kobane) in northern Syria, where the PKK-YPG has its Syrian headquarters ," the interior minister said. Turkish Suleyman Soylu, referring to the Kurdistan Workers' Party (Pkk) and the Syrian Kurdish People's Protection Unit (Ypg), considered by Ankara to be terrorists. Soylu named the PKK responsible for the attack. For the moment, there have been no claims while one person has been identified : President Recep Tayip Erdogan and his deputy Fuat Oktay had spoken of a woman.
The dynamics are still to be clarified in detail. The great blaze developed yesterday, in broad daylight, in the shopping streets of Istanbul, near Taksim square. It was 4.20pm (local time) when a woman placed a bag full of explosives on the ground . "There are two possibilities: either the bag had an internal mechanism to explode autonomously or it was detonated with a remote control, the investigation follows both hypotheses", Turkish Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said in the evening . "That woman sat on a bench for 40 minutes and then got up: the explosion came a minute or two later," Bozdag said.
Messages of condolences continue to arrive from all over the world . "The images of Istanbul are terrible, I want to express our deepest condolences to Turkey for the attack suffered and the death of innocent citizens", wrote the Italian premier Giorgia Meloni on Twitter, while the High Representative of Foreign Policy of the European Union Josep Borrell spoke of "horrible news", expressing closeness "to the Turkish people and to the families of the victims of the attack".
(Unioneonline/ss)