Davutoglu said Thursday Turkish military targeted 500 extremist positions along the border with Syria and near a Turkish camp in northern Iraq.
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Efkan Ala said during a news conference with his German counterpart that the suspect was detained late Tuesday.
As a result, “Turkey continues to identify the main problem as the PKK and (Syrian President Bashar) Assad”, said Svante Cornell, director of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute.
The Islamic State and other militant factions have waged similar attacks targeting tourist sites in other countries, including an armed siege of Tunisia’s renowned Bardo Museum last March that claimed more than 20 lives, many European visitors.
Although not as deadly as two attacks in Turkey a year ago that were blamed on IS, Tuesday’s bombing had heightened resonance because it struck at Turkey’s $30 billion tourism industry, which has already suffered from a steep decline in Russian visitors since Turkey shot down a Russian warplane near the Syrian border in November.
The ministry made the statement after a suicide bomber blew himself up in the center of Istanbul on Tuesday, killing 10 German tourists.
“This incident is a bit different”.
But just as officials tried to reassure nervous tourists, a new blast rocked Turkey – an attack on a police headquarters in the Cinar district of Turkey’s southeastern province of Diyarbakir, Turkey’s semiofficial Anadolu Agency reported, citing local officials.
“It’s different in terms of intentions and in terms of its targets”, he told Reuters. Scarves with the Bayern Munich football club emblem were left along with carnations and roses at the scene, before Turkish police sealed off the area.
Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said during a visit to Istanbul Wednesday: “According to the investigations so far, there are no indications that the attack was directed specifically against Germans, and so there can’t be a connection to our contribution to the fight against global terrorism”.
“If the terrorists aimed to destroy or endanger the cooperation between partners, then they achieved the opposite”, de Maziere said.
Germany’s foreign minister says his country won’t make any further immediate changes to its travel advice for Turkey but could do so in light of the investigation into Tuesday’s Istanbul bombing. He vowed to work closely with Germany in investigating the attack.
India today condemned the terror attack in Istanbul in which at least 10 people were killed and asserted that it unequivocally opposes terrorism in all its forms. In the last 48 hours, almost 200 ISIS members, who were all individually identified, among them: “so-called regional leaders, were neutralized”.
He said Turkey had detained 3,318 people over suspected links to Islamic State and other radical groups since Syria’s conflict began, 847 of whom, majority foreigners, had subsequently been arrested.
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Russia’s Consulate General in the Turkish city of Antalya has confirmed three Russians suspected of having connections to Islamic State have been arrested.
