Suicide bombing in the center of Istanbul
The kamikaze died, 32 people were injured

ISTANBUL – A bomb attack against riot police officers caused 32 wounded in Istanbul.
According to the reconstruction provided by the authorities, at around 10.30am, a 20-year-old man approached a police bus parked on one side of Taksim Square, the heart of the Turkish metropolis, and attempted to get on board. Having failed, he blew up a bomb that he had tied to his body. The blast killed the bomber and wounded 15 agents and 17 civilians, none of whom is in danger of death. On the square, where at the time of the attack a student demonstration was underway and hundreds of tourists were circulating, an unexploded bomb was subsequently found that was defused by the bomb squad.

Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, who at the time of the attack was visiting Mardin, in the south-east with a Kurdish majority, condemned the “terrorist” act and warned that “those who threaten peace, the security and development of Turkey will not be tolerated “. “These attacks”, he added, “will not stop Turkey from achieving its goals of peace, brotherhood and development”.

There were no claims, but in the past Istanbul ended up being targeted by Kurdish separatists and Al Qaeda. The Kurds of the PKK once used kamikazes in Ankara in 2003, while in 2006 Al Qaeda had killed 62 in Istanbul with a kamikaze attack. The Taksim Square attack arrived on the day when the unilateral truce proclaimed by the PKK expired to encourage the Turkish government to start a dialogue on the Kurdish question, but the group announced an extension and ruled out attacks against civilians. Sources of security favor the Kurdish track, claiming that in Turkey Al Qaeda has favored car bombs.

The last serious attack in Istanbul dated back to June 22 last year, when a bomb exploded in a peripheral zone when a bus of soldiers passed: five soldiers had died and the teenage daughter of one of them. The attack was claimed by the Hawks for the freedom of Kurdistan, an obscure group loyal to former Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan, sentenced to life imprisonment in 1999.

A few hours after the explosion in Taksim, the police arrested 16 alleged members of a clandestine extreme left group called the ‘Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front (Dhkp-C). The authorities did not link these arrests with the attack, but the same group claimed a suicide attack still carried out against the police and in the same square in January 2001 (the kamikaze, a man, and a policeman died). On 10 September of the same year, a woman most likely affiliated with Dhkp-C blew herself up in front of the Taksim police station, causing the death of two officers and wounding about twenty people, including 13 policemen.

(October 31, 2010)