President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, speaking live on national television in front of Istanbul’s city hall, said the attacker was aged between 12 and 14.
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Daesh is an Arabic name for ISIS.
With 69 people still in hospital, 17 in a critical condition, the HDP said warnings about IS’s growing foothold in Gaziantep had fallen on deaf ears.
The remains of a suicide vest have been recovered at the site, according to the state-run Anadolu Agency, citing a statement by the chief public prosecutor’s office. “There were blood and body parts everywhere”. The bride was not hurt, one local official said.
“We couldn’t see anything”.
Images from the scene showed bodies covered in white sheets while distraught relatives of the victims were comforted in the street.
“I don’t know what happened”.
Gaziantep’s Governor Ali Yerlikaya said in a statement that 50 people had been killed, raising a previous toll of 30. During the explosion, the neighbor died on top of me.
Turkish authorities issued a media blackout on coverage of the attack until the investigation is completed. A dual suicide bombing blamed on IS at a peace rally in Turkey’s capital, Ankara, in October killed 103 people.
Hurriyet said the type of bomb used – stuffed with scraps of metal – was similar to the explosives used in previous suicide bombings against pro-Kurdish gatherings blamed on IS in the border town of Suruc and at Ankara train station a year ago. However, ISIS has not yet claimed the attack.
Three suspected Islamic State suicide bombers killed 44 people at Istanbul’s main airport in June.
“Our country and nation only have a single message to those who attack us – you will not succeed!”.
“ISIS has been trying to agitate or exploit already tense ethnic and sectarian faultlines” in Turkey, and weaken Kurdish militants who play a role in the Syrian war, Metin Gurcan, a security analyst and former Turkish military officer, said.
THE suicide bomber who killed 51 people at a Kurdish wedding party in south-east Turkey on Saturday could have been as young as 12, the country’s president said yesterday.
Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Simsek visited the wounded in hospital on Sunday, describing the attack as a “massacre of unprecedented cruelty and barbarism”.
“The aim of terror is to scare the people, but we will not allow this”, he added. “It is barbaric to attack a wedding”.
Shortly after Saturday’s bombing, the pro-Kurdish political party HDP condemned the attack, while noting it came just hours after a Kurdish militant organization battling the Ankara government for autonomy announced new plans to try to end the decades-long conflict.
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The bride and groom reportedly survived the bombing, but some of their close family members did not. USA -backed Syrian rebel groups have been seizing territory from ISIS near the Turkish border recently. Then in July, the failed military coup resulted in more than 240 deaths, including almost 50 civilians. Tens of thousands of people were arrested or suspended from their jobs in a subsequent crackdown against suspected sympathisers of the plotters.
