A Kurdish wedding in Turkey ended in tragedy when a suicide bomber attacked.
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People attend funeral services for dozens of people killed in last night’s bomb attack targeting an outdoor wedding party in Gaziantep, southeastern Turkey.
Over the past week, several attacks left 12 people dead in the largely Kurdish southeast, mostly police and soldiers, in an escalation that officials blamed on PKK militants.
President Erdogan confirmed in a statement to the public broadcaster NTV that 51 people had died in the bombing, while 69 injured people are being treated at hospitals around the province, Reuters reports.
The Turkish President claimed today that the terrorist who murdered at least 51 people and injured dozens more was a boy between 12-14 years old.
According to Turkey’s Dogan news agency, the bride and groom had moved to Gaziantep from the Kurdish town of Siirt further east to escape fighting between Kurdish rebels and security forces. The groom’s sister and uncle were among the dead, the agency reported.
This is a developing story.
The party also suggested that IS carried out the attack hours after another Kurdish political party announced plans to negotiate to try to end a three-decade conflict between Kurdish militants and the Turkish government.
Meanwhile, the prime minister said the attack had turned “a wedding party into a place of mourning” and said that Turkey would triumph against these “devilish” attacks.
Erdogan said the aim of such attacks was to sow division between different groups in Turkey including Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen and to “spread incitement along ethnic and religious lines”.
Blood stains and burns marked the walls of the narrow lane where the wedding party was attacked while women in white and checkered scarves cried sitting crosslegged and waiting outside the morgue for word on missing relatives.
Multiple opposition parties denounced the attack, as did many foreign governments including the U.S., Germany, Austria, Russia, Egypt, Sweden, Greece, France, Bahrain, Qatar and Jordan and global institutions including the United Nations, the European Union and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.
“This was a barbaric attack”.
Mehmet Erdogan, a ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) lawmaker for Gaziantep said there was a “high possibility” it was a suicide attack, comments echoed by deputy prime minister Mehmet Simsek. Islamic State has been blamed for suicide bombings on Kurdish gatherings in the past. “The goal of terror is to scare people, but we will not accept this”, he said on television. “They will not yield”.
According to CNN, the attacktargeted a Kurdish wedding party in a Kurdish neighborhood – and there could have been “a number of reasons” for ISIS to target Kurdish people.
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Foreign governments have also condemned the attack, with statements issued by the U.S., Sweden, Greece, France, Bahrain, Qatar and Jordan.
