The suicide bomber who detonated the bomb that killed 10 German tourists had arrived in Turkey from Syria and registered as a refugee.
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Turkish land forces have fired nearly 500 times on Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) targets in Syria and Iraq, killing almost 200 militants in response to a suicide bombing in İstanbul which killed 10 German tourists, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu said on Thursday.
It was hit by two major bombings a year ago blamed on the group, in the town of Suruc near the Syrian border and in the capital Ankara, the latter killing more than 100 people in the worst attack of its kind on Turkish soil.
Turkish authorities have identified the Istanbul suicide bomber as a 28-year-old Syrian who entered Turkey on January 5 along as an “ordinary migrant” fleeing the country’s civil war.
Ala said the figure included five previously announced arrests: four who were detained Wednesday in relation to the attack and one who was detained on Tuesday evening.
He added that the country will take more visible security steps in densely populated areas in the wake of the attack.
Reports accused Turkey of becoming a conduit for financial support to jihadists, turning a blind eye to their entry into Syria and even supplying weapons.
“This person was not someone who was being monitored”, Davutoglu said.
Security forces have arrested dozens of people across Turkey, including three Russian nationals for alleged links to Daesh in the aftermath of the deadly Sultanahmet blast in Istanbul, security sources told Anadolu Agency on Wednesday. “It was an attack against humanity”, he said.
In his first reaction to the Istanbul attack, Erdogan unequivocally condemned the bombing but then conspicuously spoke at greater length against the PKK.
The Turkish premier said other countries fighting the Islamic State group had to adopt “a honest stance”, accusing Russian Federation both of preventing Turkey from carrying out raids on the extremists and of bombing schools and hospitals in Syria instead of fighting IS.
Russian news agencies said he was suspected of helping send new recruits from Russia to the militant group.
Although Turkey initially carried out a limited number of air strikes against Islamic State in Syria as part of the U.S.-led effort, its warplanes have not flown in Syrian air space since Turkey shot down a Russian fighter jet in late November, triggering a diplomatic row with Moscow. The Foreign Ministry advised Germans after the attack to avoid crowds in public places and outside tourist sites in Istanbul. Some IS fighters of Russian origin are believed to have left the IS to settle in Turkey, families say.
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The dead include two couples, one in their seventies, and the other aged 59 and 61.
