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Kurdish car bomb plot foiled near Ankara

Video footage showed forensic teams in white overalls inspecting the site as police secured the area around a hut in flat countryside on the road to the town of Haymana.

October 8, 2016 at 6:07 pm

Two militants believed to be preparing a car bomb attack detonated explosives and were killed near Ankara today after Turkish police told them to surrender, the provincial governor said.

The blast, which he saw as linked to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) armed group, coincided with a fresh spate of violence in Turkey’s southeast which killed 12 people, with police gunfire killing four of them, authorities said.

“It looks like there is a high probability of a PKK link,” Ankara Governor Ercan Topaca told reporters at the scene of the explosion outside the capital, describing the militants as one male and one female.
Video footage showed forensic teams in white overalls inspecting the site as police secured the area around a hut in flat countryside on the road to the town of Haymana.

“A big disaster was prevented. They were probably going to attack Ankara,” Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag told broadcaster CNN Turk in an interview.

At the scene of today’s explosion in Ankara, police seized two pieces of plastic explosives and 200 kilograms of ammonium nitrate, the governor’s office said in a statement. Ammonium nitrate is an ingredient in bomb-making.

It said security forces moved against the militants at 06:00 am (0300 GMT) at a stud farm 30 kilometres from the capital after a tip-off from Diyarbakir.

An identity card found at the scene, believed to belong to one of the would-be bombers, was of a man from the southeastern province of Bingol. A third individual was also being sought, the governor said.

On Turkey’s border with Iraq, in the Cukurca district, Turkish troops killed eight PKK militants in the latest clash on Friday, the military said in a statement.

The PKK has fought a three-decade-old insurgency which has killed more than 40,000 people. It is designated as a terrorist group by Turkey, the United States and the European Union. A two-year-old ceasefire between the group and the Turkish state collapsed in July last year, triggering renewed violence.

Last Thursday, a bomb attack near a police station in Istanbul wounded 10 people. The Kurdistan Freedom Hawks (TAK), a PKK offshoot, claimed responsibility for that blast.