The group described Sunday’s auto bombing as revenge for security operations in the mainly Kurdish southeast of Turkey that have been underway since July.
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“There’s no reason at all that the bomb which detonated in Ankara would not detonate in Brussels… or in any other European city”, Erdogan said according to the state-run Anadolu news agency.
But critics say the heavy-handed operations are collective punishment and security forces have killed civilians with impunity.
The terrorist attack was planned by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) terrorist group, said the newspaper citing the country’s law enforcement bodies. A PKK offshoot has claimed responsibility for two suicide bombings that killed 66 people in Ankara in the last month. It coincides with the spring thaw, a time when in previous years PKK fighters re-entered Turkey from mountain hideouts in northern Iraq.
Turkey, the United States, and some of their North Atlantic Treaty Organisation allies have officially labeled the communist PKK as a terrorist group.
The arrests came just hours before another suicide attack in a busy Istanbul shopping street which killed four and wounded 20, the city governor said.
The Foreign Ministry said the closures were a “precautionary measure” and called on all Germans now in Turkey to take particular care when in public, broadcaster NTV reports.
The PKK terrorist organization claimed responsibility for the blast on Thursday.
A police officer opened fire and killed his female colleague and another civilian in Dikmen district of Ankara on Friday morning.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is headed to the EU-summit in Brussels today for negotiations with Turkey, said in a speech to parliament Thursday that press freedom is one of the topics Germany needs to discuss with Turkey.
Turkish police Friday found a bomb in a vehicle parked near a regional government office in the southeastern province of Diyarbakir.
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A s Turkey nears a deal that would grant it unprecedented integration into the European Union, the country resembles its Middle Eastern neighbours ever more closely.
