Separatist Kurdish militants carried out the two bomb blasts in Istanbul last week that killed 17 people, Turkish Interior Minister Besir Atalay said on Saturday, announcing several arrests.
“This was an inhumane act by the bloody separatist terrorist organization,” Atalay told reporters, using the official description of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
Ten suspects were handed over to the judicial authorities, Atalay said, adding that they comprised most of those involved in last Sunday’s blasts, including those who “personally took part” in the attacks.
Eight of the suspects were later charged with membership in the PKK and held in detention, while the remaining two were released, the Anatolia news agency reported.
The police consider the incident to be resolved as the findings leave “no room for hesitation,” Atalay said at the Istanbul police headquarters, where weapons and other implicating materials seized in the suspects’ houses were displayed.
Two bombs, planted in rubbish containers, exploded about 10 minutes apart last Sunday in a crowded pedestrian street in the popular Gungoren neighborhood, on Istanbul’s European side.
The first bomb drew a large crowd of onlookers and the second, more powerful blast killed 17, including five children and a pregnant woman.
Twenty-seven of the 154 people who were injured remained in hospital, but none was in a life-threatening condition, Atalay said.
Among the eight suspects charged were two men, identified as Huseyin Tureli and Ziya Kirac, who witnesses said behaved suspiciously in the street shortly before the explosions, Anatolia said.
Prosecutors will now draw up an indictment detailing the charges before a trial can begin.
In the course of the investigation, Atalay said, the police also established that a bomb blast that wounded 10 people at an outdoor cafe in Istanbul on June 15 was the work of the same assailants.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has described the Gungoren blasts as “the cost” of an intensified military crackdown against the PKK, both inside Turkey and in northern Iraq, where the rebels take refuge.
Following the blasts, Turkish warplanes bombed Tuesday a PKK base in the Qandil mountains in northern Iraq, a major PKK stronghold, killing an unspecified number of militants.
The PKK, listed as a terrorist organization by Ankara and much of the international community, has denied responsibility for the bombings, the deadliest attack on civilians in Turkey since 2003 when two sets of twin suicide bombings, blamed on al-Qaeda, claimed 63 lives in Istanbul.
Some analysts have said that the PKK leadership is in disarray and cannot control radical cells.
In January, the PKK apologized for a car bombing in the mainly Kurdish city of Diyarbakir that killed seven people, saying that it was the work of militants who acted without the leadership’s approval.
The PKK took up arms for self-rule in Turkey’s mainly Kurdish southeast in 1984, sparking a conflict that has claimed more than 37,000 lives.
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