A string of bombings, blamed on Kurdish rebels and targeting Turkey’s security forces, killed at least 14 people and wounded more than 220 others, officials said Thursday.
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One of the bombings struck near a hall in the far eastern city of Van where a wedding party was in full swing, sending the bride and groom and their guests fleeing in panic.
“Our fight against terror will never cease”, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said. Last week, PKK commander Cemil Bayik threatened increased attacks against police in Turkish cities.
Three police officers were killed and 170 people wounded by a auto bomb at a police station in Turkey’s eastern city of Elazig yesterday, the local governor’s office said, hours after a similar attack killed three people elsewhere in the region.
The force of the blast left the building largely in ruins and turned nearby vehicles into blackened, mangled wrecks.
Another three soldiers and a guard were killed in a third attack that targeted a military convoy in the southeastern town of Bitlis on Thursday, said state-run Anadolu news agency, which also blamed the PKK.
The explosion occurred at a police station in the south eastern city of Van late on Wednesday evening killing two civilians and one police officer.
Video footage showed a plume of black smoke rising above the city after the blast, which uprooted trees and gouged a large crater outside the police complex, located on a busy thoroughfare in the city of 420,000 people.
Officials blamed the PKK, with one accusing the rebels of collaborating with supporters of US -based preacher Fethullah Gulen, accused by Ankara of orchestrating the coup bid.
But with last month’s failed coup, Erdogan has also sought to blame the Gulen movement for all of Turkey’s ills, so today he tried to blame both, saying the Kurds were to blame for the attacks but that Gulen and his followers were “complicit”.
“The West doesn’t understand our struggle, they didn’t understand, they don’t understand and they won’t understand”, he said in a speech. Turkey and its allies consider the PKK a terrorist organisation.
The Van governor’s office said the PKK was responsible. Since then, more than 600 Turkish security personnel and thousands of PKK militants have been killed, according to Anadolu.
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Anadolu said the operations have killed more than 7,000 militants in Turkey and northern Iraq but the toll can not be independently verified.
