A Turkish far-left group called the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C) has claimed responsibility for a suspected suicide bomb attack at a police station in Istanbul’s historic Sultanahmet district on Tuesday that killed one officer and wounded another.
A female suicide bomber reportedly entered the police station saying in English that she had lost her purse before blowing herself up inside the three-story building, across the square from the Hagia Sophia museum and the 17th-century Blue Mosque, which are among the main sites for millions of visitors to Istanbul each year.
In a statement posted on “The People’s Cry” Web site hours after the attack, the group said the bombing was against the ruling AK Party over the killing of 15-year-old Berkin Elvan, who died in March last year after nine months in a coma from a head wound sustained during an anti-government protest.
Photo: AFP
“It is the same state which shot Berkin Elvan and which protects the thief ministers,” the statement said, in an apparent reference to a Monday ruling of a parliamentary commission not to commit four former ministers to a higher court over graft allegations.
Turkey’s Dec. 17 corruption investigation swirled around the inner circle of then-Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and led to the resignation of the ministers of economy, interior and urbanization.
The commission, dominated by members of the ruling AK Party, voted on Monday not to send the four former ministers to trial, a decision that the opposition decried as a cover-up of one of Turkey’s biggest-ever corruption scandals.
DHKP-C also claimed responsibility for a grenade attack on police near the Turkish prime minister’s office in Istanbul last week.
The group was also behind an alleged suicide bombing at the US embassy last year, as well as attacks on police stations.
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