Turkey detains dozens of people in raids following suicide bomb attack

ANKARA – Police detained a minimum of 67 people throughout Turkey on Tuesday in a sweep concentrated on people with alleged hyperlinks to Kurdish militants, days after a suicide bomb attack in the Turkish capital.

Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya stated police performed raids in 16 Turkish provinces, detaining 55 people suspected of being phase of the “intelligence structure” of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. At least 12 different suspected PKK participants had been rounded up in a separate operation in 5 provinces, Yerlikaya wrote on X, the social media platform previously referred to as Twitter.

The PKK has led a decades-long insurgency in Turkey and is regarded as a fear group through the United States and the European Union. Tens of hundreds of people have died because the get started of the warfare in 1984.

On Sunday, a suicide bomber detonated an explosive tool close to an front to the Interior Ministry hours ahead of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was once set to handle Parliament because it returned from its summer time recess. A 2d would-be bomber was once killed in a shootout with police.

Two cops had been somewhat wounded in the attack. The suspects arrived on the scene within a automobile they seized from a veterinarian in the central Turkish of Kayseri after taking pictures him in the pinnacle, officers stated.

The PKK claimed duty for the attack, in keeping with a news web page on the subject of the crowd, whilst Turkish government recognized one of the assailants as a PKK militant. Hours later, Turkey’s Air Force performed airstrikes on suspected PKK websites in northern Iraq, the place the crowd’s management is based totally. The Defense Ministry stated a big quantity of PKK militants had been “neutralized” in the moves.

Yerlikaya didn’t explain whether or not the people rounded up on Tuesday had been suspected of direct involvement in Sunday’s attack.