A car bomb followed by a suicide bombing less than a minute later killed 29 people and wounded 166 outside a football stadium in Istanbul on Saturday night, Turkish interior minister Suleyman Soylu said.<\/p>\n
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All but two of those killed in the blasts were police officers, Soylu told a news conference with other government ministers. He said 17 of the wounded were undergoing surgery and another six were in intensive care.<\/p>\n
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Deputy prime minister Numan Kurtulmus said the suicide bomber had detonated 45 seconds after the car bomb. Soylu said 10 people had been detained based on evidence from the detonated vehicle. Turkey\u2019s interior minister says two bombings in Istanbul have killed 29 people and wounded 116.<\/p>\n
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Soylu described the blasts outside the Vodafone Arena, home to Istanbul\u2019s Be\u015fikta\u0219 football team, as a \u201ccruel plot\u201d.<\/p>\n
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There was no immediate claim of responsibility. Islamic State, Kurdish and far-left militants have all carried out bomb attacks in recent years. The Nato member is part of the US-led coalition fighting Isis in Syria and is battling an insurgency by Kurdish militants in the south-east of the country.<\/p>\n
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\u201cIt was like hell. The flames went all the way up to the sky. I was drinking tea at the cafe next to the mosque,\u201d said Omer Yilmaz, who works as a cleaner at the nearby Dolmabah\u00e7e mosque, directly across the road from the stadium.<\/p>\n
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\u201cPeople ducked under the tables, women began crying. Football fans drinking tea at the cafe sought shelter. It was horrible,\u201d he told Reuters.<\/p>\n
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A Reuters photographer said many riot police officers were seriously injured. Armed police sealed off streets. A police water cannon doused the wreckage of a burned-out car and there were two separate fires on the road outside the stadium.<\/p>\n
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Broadcaster NTV said one of the explosions had targeted a police vehicle that was leaving the stadium after fans had already dispersed.<\/p>\n
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Turkish football team Bursaspor, which finished a match against Be\u015fikta\u015f attended by thousands of people two hours before the blasts, said none of its fans appeared to have been injured. It and Be\u015fikta\u015f both said they condemned the attacks. \u201cThose attacking our nation\u2019s unity and solidarity will never win,\u201d sports minister Akif \u00c7ag\u011ftay Kilic said on Twitter.<\/p>\n
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Turkey\u2019s transport minister, Ahmet Arslan, also writing on Twitter, described it as a terrorist attack.<\/p>\n
\u201cI condemn the terror attack on Be\u015fikta\u015f, Istanbul, and wish all those injured a speedy recovery,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n
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President Tayyip Erdogan, who was in Istanbul at the time of the explosions, had been in contact with the chief of Istanbul police and the prime minister and was following developments closely, sources in his office said.<\/p>\n
The US consulate in Istanbul issued a tweet urging people to avoid the area.<\/p>\n
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Turkey has been hit by a series of bombings in recent years, some blamed on Isis militants, others claimed by Kurdish and far-left militant groups.<\/p>\n
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In June, around 45 people were killed and hundreds wounded when three suspected Isis militants carried out a gun and bomb attack on Istanbul\u2019s Ataturk airport.<\/p>\n
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There was growing speculation, less than an hour after the explosions, that rebels with the Kurdish Workers\u2019 party (PKK) or an offshoot of the group were behind the attack.<\/p>\n
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The organisation has been calling for an independent Kurdish state within Turkey since the late 1970s and in recent months, following the botched coup against President Erdogan in July and the crackdown that ensued, has stepped up targeted assaults against police.<\/p>\n
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Erdal G\u00fcven, editor in chief of Diken, an independent news portal based in Istanbul, said the brazen attack bore all the hallmarks of the group. \u201cEarly suspicions would fall on the PKK or an affiliated organisation, TAK, which always targets the police and has been behind similar bombings in Ankara,\u201d he told the Guardian. \u201cThe other suspect, Isis, attacks indiscriminately. It doesn\u2019t care if civilians are killed as well. This seems to have been specifically aimed at the police.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A car bomb followed by a suicide bombing less than a minute later killed 29 people and wounded 166 outside a football stadium in Istanbul on Saturday night, Turkish interior minister Suleyman Soylu said. All but two of those killed in the blasts were police officers, Soylu told a news conference with other government ministers. He said 17 of the wounded were undergoing surgery and another six were in intensive care. Deputy prime minister Numan Kurtulmus said the suicide bomber had detonated 45 seconds after the car bomb.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":4546,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4545"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4545"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4545\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4547,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4545\/revisions\/4547"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}