A group of men stopped an Istanbul bus full of passengers on Sunday night and tossed molotov cocktails at it, leading to three deaths when the driver reversed his flaming vehicle onto a sidewalk and ran over a group of people nearby, police officials said.
At least two of those killed were elderly women, and another woman was injured and in serious condition, the police said.
Police said they suspected Kurdish militants were behind the attack.
PHOTO: AP
Images after the chaotic incident in the Bagcilar district of Istanbul showed the bus propped up on the sidewalk and engulfed in flames, which shot out of every broken window.
Private NTV television said men gathered around after the attack and shouted slogans for the PKK, an outlawed Kurdish separatist group that is considered a terrorist organization by the US and the EU.
The three deaths come on the sixth day of riots between Kurdish demonstrators and security forces that have spread from the southeast to Istanbul, which is the country's largest city and has a large Kurdish population.
Meanwhile, another person was killed in clashes in the predominantly Kurdish southeast. The 22-year-old Kurdish man was killed by gunfire in the southeastern town of Kiziltepe, near the Syrian border, where street battles between rioters and the police flared for a second day in row, a senior local Kurdish politician, Ferhan Turk, said.
Three others were injured, he said. Officials were not immediately available for comment.
Tension has been high in Turkey recently, and if the Istanbul bus attack is proven to have been carried out by pro-Kurdish demonstrators, it would bring to 12 the total number of people killed in related violent incidents in the past week.
Nine people have died in riots in the southeast sparked by funerals for 14 PKK guerrillas killed by Turkish troops last week. Thousands of Kurds have rampaged across the southeast. An angry crowd torched a bank and vandalized public buildings, party offices and shops in Kiziltepe on Saturday, prompting the security forces to fire warning shots and use tear gas, killing one person.
Also in Istanbul, home to a sizeable Kurdish immigrant community, about 200 protesters, some of them wearing masks, took to the streets in the city center earlier on Sunday, setting fire to a truck and hurling Molotov cocktails, stones and bottles at the riot police, who responded with truncheons and pepper gas.
Several protesters, running from the police, were attacked by a group of residents in a mainly Roma neighborhood wielding knives and sticks and shouting nationalist slogans.
At least seven demonstrators were detained, the Anatolia news agency said.
A shadowy and violent group believed to be linked to the PKK, the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons, or TAK by its Kurdish acronym, has promised more violence and vowed to strike at the nation's tourism industry. The group claimed a bombing in Istanbul on Friday that killed one person and injured more than 10 others.
Meanwhile, Ahmet Turk, the co-chairman of Turkey's main Kurdish party, the Democratic Society Party, urged an end to the violence and called on Ankara to come up with far-reaching reforms to make permanent peace with its largest minority.
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