A bomb blast at an Istanbul cafe late Saturday night injured at least two people, police said.
The blast, which police said was caused by either a remote-controlled bomb or a bomb on a timer, took place at a cafe at the bottom of the Galata bridge, a popular area for tourists and Turks to go for fish dinners.
A Dutch citizen and a Turk who worked at the cafe were injured, the Anatolia news agency reported. Police at the site earlier said that three people were injured, but a police official later said that only two people were injured. There was no immediate explanation for the discrepancy.
A police official also said that police suspected that Kurdish rebels were behind the attack. The official spoke on condition of anonymity. Turkish civil servants are rarely allowed to speak on the record.
Mashar Adanas, a vendor selling grilled fish sandwiches about 100m away from the cafe, said he felt a violent explosion and then saw people running out of the cafe shouting "bomb, bomb."
Mustafa Bulut, who was selling corn from a cart near the blast, said he also saw people running from the cafe.
"I turned around right away and everyone was running. Everyone panicked," Bulut said.
Police in white outfits could be seen searching the area near the blast with flashlights for evidence as other police kept onlookers away from the site.
Last Saturday, a bomb placed under a seat of a minibus in a popular Aegean beach resort killed five people, including an Irish teenager and a British woman.
No group has claimed responsibility for that blast, but suspicion also fell on Kurdish guerrillas.
In other developments, Turkish forces killed five Kurdish rebels, including a woman, in a gunbattle in southeast Turkey, a local governor's office said Saturday.
The violence brings to 15 the number of rebels killed in the past 10 days.
The clash occurred Thursday when Turkish soldiers came across a group of rebels and called for their surrender, the Sirnak governor's office said in a statement. The rebels responded with gunfire, and five were killed in the ensuing clash, the statement added.
It was not clear why the report on the clash was first released Saturday.
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