Small bomb injures one near PM office

ANKARA - Hürriyet Daily News

AA Photo

A small bomb exploded near the prime ministry building yesterday, hours before the weekly Cabinet meeting was set to begin, leaving one person slightly injured.

The explosion, which hit at 9:45 a.m. and sparked panic in the heart of the capital, followed a bomb attack near the ruling party’s Istanbul office last week. Footage from security cameras showed a man in his 30s leaving a plastic bag at the site of the explosion outside the Appeals Court, the Doğan news agency reported.

The site of the explosion, at the entrance of a car park shared by the Appeals Court and the prime ministry, was only 30 meters away from the building housing Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s main office, where he convened the Cabinet at noon, an hour behind schedule.

“It is understood that it was 150 grams of light explosives planted in a plastic bottle,” Ankara Gov. Alaadin Yuksel told reporters. Asked how such an attack could have happened in such a high security area, he said: “We are examining everything. Our colleagues are examining the camera footage.”
The wounded person was an Appeals Court driver, Yüksel said. The area is home to several other ministries and government offices, with Parliament and the General Staff headquarters also located nearby. Police sealed off the area, and bomb experts conducted a search for a possible second bomb. There was no immediate claim of responsibility.

Last week’s remote-controlled bomb in Istanbul was mounted on a motorcycle and went off as a police bus passed, leaving 15 policemen and a civilian injured.

“It seems that some people are again trying to raise tensions in Turkey. I hope there won’t be another incident,” Culture and Tourism Minister Ertuğrul Günay said yesterday.

Oktay Vural of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) pointed an accusing finger at the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and charged that negotiations with the group had emboldened its militants.

“Now that a bomb has exploded under the prime minister’s nose and since his representatives met with the PKK in Oslo, the Justice and Development Party [AKP] must know where the other bombs of the PKK are,” Vural said.

He was referring to leaked audio tapes from meetings between intelligence officials and the PKK, in which a member of the Turkish team chided the militants for having “packed” urban areas with explosives. k HDN