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Kurd militants claim bombings responsibility
(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-08-24 15:39

ISTANBUL -- A Kurdish militant group has claimed responsibility for bomb attacks last week in the Turkish coastal cities of Mersin and Izmir, a news agency close to Kurdish separatists said.

A suspected suicide bomber detonated a bomb in his car near the Mediterranean city of Mersin on Tuesday, killing himself and wounding 12 police officers.

Police and medics try to help the injured among clouds of smoke after a car exploded as a minibus carrying police officers passed by in the western Turkish city of Izmir, August 21, 2008.  [Agencies]
 

Two days later 16 people were wounded, including eight police and three soldiers, in a car bomb which ripped through a minibus in the western Turkish city of Izmir.

Turkish media said on Sunday eight people had been detained in connection with the Izmir attack.

The Firat news agency reported the Kurdistan Freedom Hawks (TAK) as saying their militants had carried out both attacks. The shadowy TAK group is believed to have close links to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) guerrillas.

The PKK launched its armed insurgency against the Turkish state in 1984 with the aim of creating an ethnic homeland in mainly Kurdish southeast Turkey. Some 40,000 people have been killed in the conflict.

Before the claim of responsibility analysts said the PKK was stepping up bomb attacks in Turkey in an attempt to show it was still a force to be reckoned with despite being weakened by Turkish air strikes on its bases in northern Iraq.

Islamist militants and leftist guerrillas have also carried out bomb attacks in Turkey in the past.