Twin Blasts Target Police Stations in Turkey, Kill Six, Injure 219

Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) is believed to be behind the attack.

A car bomb explosion in Sadr city of Baghdad on August 5, 2015. (Photo: AP)

At least three police officers were killed and about 100 people wounded by a car bomb at a police station in the eastern Turkish city of Elazig on Thursday, security sources said, hours after a similar bombing killed three people elsewhere in the region.

No one immediately claimed responsibility, but Defence Minister Fikri Isik told the state-run Anadolu Agency that the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), deemed a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the United States and the European Union, was behind the attack.

The PKK has carried out dozens of attacks on police and military posts in the largely Kurdish southeast since 2015, but Elazig, a conservative province that votes in large numbers for the ruling AK Party, had been spared violence until now.

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, in the city of 420,000 people.

Van Province Attacked

Earlier on Wednesday two police officers and one civilian were killed and 73 people were wounded late on Wednesday when a car bomb exploded near a police station, in Turkey’s Van province, further east of Elazig.

There were also no claims for the attack in Van, a largely Kurdish province on the Iranian border. The Van governor’s office however said the PKK was responsible.

The southeast has been scorched by violence since a 2-1/2-year ceasefire with the PKK collapsed in July last year. Thousands of militants and hundreds of soldiers and police officers have been killed, according to official figures. Rights groups say about 400 civilians have also been killed.

(With agency inputs)