Amateur footage was captured in the Sultanahmet tourist area of police rushing in to help the wounded – with one police vehicle overturning on the way there.
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A Turkish official said Wednesday authorities had arrested one person in connection with the suicide bombing Tuesday in Istanbul that killed 10 people.
One of them was detained in Istanbul late on Tuesday, said Interior Minister Efkan Ala, but no details have been released so far about the other four.
A blast at Istanbul’s Sultanahmet district on Tuesday morning killed 10 people – mostly German tourists – and wounded 15 others. “He had an innocent face and was wearing modern clothes”, she said.
Turkey was quick to identify the bomber, named by Turkish media as 28-year old Saudi-born Nabil Fadli, as the man who had given his fingerprints a week ago at an immigration center.
The Russian foreign ministry confirmed three of those detained were Russian nationals, but it was not immediately clear whether there was any connection to the Istanbul attack, for which there has been no claim of responsibility. A total of 11 are undergoing treatment and two of them are critical, Ala said.
Turkey has been hit by a string of deadly attacks blamed on extremists over the past year, including a double suicide bombing in October in Ankara that killed more than 100 people.
Kurdish rebels early on Thursday detonated a auto bomb at a police station then attacked it with rocket launchers and firearms, injuring 39 people, including civilians, Turkish media reports said.
The coordinated attacks in Paris by Islamic State-affiliated terrorists, including two who allegedly traveled to Europe posing as refugees, have sparked alarm in Europe and the U.S. Some politicians have suggested that their countries only accept Christian refugees.
The disclosure raises questions for the Turkish security services and comes as Turkey arrested 68 people in a round-up of suspected members of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
The operator said customers can also opt to postpone their trip to Istanbul without penalties for the next six days. However, authorities said the suspects do not seem to be directly linked to Tuesday’s deadly attack.
Later, three Russian nationals were detained, also suspected of links with IS.
The Russian Foreign Ministry in November said the number of Russians that left for Syria to fight for the Islamic State group at 2719.
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A previous version of this story has been corrected to show that the German interior minister’s surname is Maiziere, not Maziere.
