The government has vowed to press on with the campaign to eradicate the PKK from eastern Turkey despite a purge in the army for those responsible for carrying out the coup. It is the fifth explosion in the past two weeks to target police offices in southeastern and eastern Turkey.
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The state-run Anadolu Agency said police on Thursday searched 204 premises after warrants were issued for the detention of 187 businessmen.
Separately, a court ordered that 187 suspects’ assets be seized, according to Anadolu.
The ministry said Thursday it received the request Wednesday and forwarded it to Greece’s justice ministry the same day.
Turkish officials say the injury toll in two vehicle bombings targeting police stations in eastern Turkey has reached at least 219.
The first vehicle bombing hit a police station in the eastern province of Van late Wednesday, killing a police officer and two civilians.
Early Thursday, another auto bombing hit police headquarters in the eastern Turkish city of Elazig. Dozens of other people, including some 20 police officers, were wounded, officials said. Murat Zorluoglu, the governor for Elazig, said the blast killed at least three police officers and wounded 146 people.
Three people were killed and 40 more wounded on Thursday in a auto bomb attack in Turkey’s eastern city of Van carried out by Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) terrorists, a local official said. At least 14 of them were in serious condition.
Footage on the CNN Turk channel showed offices inside the police station in ruins and filled with smoke after the bomb exploded just outside the complex at 9:20 a.m. (0620 GMT), when officers had already begun arriving for work.
Turkish officials blame the banned militant group Kurdistan Worker’s Party, or PKK, for the attacks. Since then, more than 600 Turkish security personnel and thousands of PKK militants have been killed, according to state-run Anadolu Agency.
A string of bombings, blamed on Kurdish rebels and targeting Turkey’s security forces, killed at least 11 people and wounded 226 others, officials said Thursday.
They said the blast killed three soldiers and a member of the state-sponsored village guard militia and wounded another seven soldiers.
But Van, a city with a mixed Kurdish and Turkish population and a popular tourist destination, has generally been spared the worst of attacks like those seen in the nearby city of Diyarbakir.
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Since July 2015, over 500 members of Turkish security forces and thousands of PKK members have been killed in confrontations inside Turkey and in northern Iraq, and more than 40,000 people have lost their lives in clashes with the PKK since 1984, when the group first started anti-government attacks.
