Istanbul, June 08: More than a dozen people have been injured in Istanbul in a roadside bomb explosion apparently aimed at a police vehicle passing through Turkey’s biggest city.
The blast struck Istanbul’s Buyukcekmece area on Tuesday morning when a remote controlled bomb went off, targeting a passing police minibus, Turkish media reported.
The incident took place in front of a hospital in the district which lies on the European side of the city straddling the Bosphorus Strait.
There were both police forces and passers-by among the wounded.
The explosion came despite tightened security in Istanbul amid an ongoing international security summit attended by several international leaders.
Similar attacks in the past have been blamed on the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which took arms in 1984 to establish an independent homeland in the country’s Kurdish majority southeast.
Listed as a terrorist group by Ankara and most of the international community, the PKK is blamed for the deaths of thousands in its decades-long armed struggle for independence.
——Agencies