ANKARA: Turkey blamed on Thursday Kurdish militants for a car bombing targeting a military convoy in Ankara that killed 28 people.
The massive bomb blast struck five buses carrying military service personnel when it stopped at a traffic light in the centre of the capital on Wednesday evening.
It was the latest in a string of deadly strikes that have rocked Turkey since last summer and one of the deadliest assaults targeting the military in the Nato member state in recent years.
Also on Thursday, at least six soldiers were killed in an attack on their convoy in the Diyarbakir region of south-eastern Turkey blamed on Kurdish militants, security sources said.
Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan both said the Ankara attack was a joint operation of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in cooperation with the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG).
“It has with certainty been revealed that this attack was carried out by members of the terrorist organisation in Turkey in cooperation with a YPG member who infiltrated from Syria,” Davutoglu told reporters. He said the bomber was a Syrian national named Salih Necar.
He warned Russia — who Turkey accuses of actively backing the YPG in Syria’s civil war — that Moscow would be “held responsible” if such attacks continued.
“This game of terror can come back and hit them like a boomerang,” he said.
Erdogan said 14 people had been detained in nationwide raids across Turkey and that the number was likely to rise.
The attack struck the heart of power in the Turkish capital in an area where the headquarters of the army, the parliament and prime minister’s offices are in close proximity.
Pictures showed at least two of the vehicles reduced to burnt-out wrecks, and the massive blast was heard all over the city, causing panic among locals.
Ankara was already on alert after 103 people were killed on October 10 in a double suicide bombing blamed on the militant Islamic State group.
Published in Dawn, February 19th, 2016
