Officials suspect suicide bomber detonated explosives, killing at least 30 people and wounding nearly 94 in Gaziantep.
At least 30 people have been killed and 94 more wounded in an explosion at a wedding ceremony in Turkey’s southeastern province of Gaziantep, near the Syria border.
The blast, which occurred at around 11pm local time on Saturday in the Akdere neighbourhood of Sahin Bey district, was a “terror attack”, Ali Yerlikaya, the governor of Gaziantep, was quoted by the Turkish media as saying.
He said ambulances were dispatched to the scene, and dead and wounded people were taken to hospitals.
Mehmet Simsek, Turkey’s deputy prime minister, told broadcaster NTV that the explosion appeared to have been caused by a suicide bomber.
READ MORE: Turkey roundtable – War on two fronts?
Fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL) group are believed to be behind the attack, Samil Tayyar, an MP with the governing Justice and Development Party, said on Twitter.
Southeastern Turkey has been hit by several deadly blasts over the past year, linked either to ISIL [also known as ISIS] or the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), an armed group outlawed in Turkey.
Three suspected ISIL suicide bombers killed 44 people at Istanbul’s main airport, Ataturk, in July, the deadliest in a string of attacks in Turkey this year.
Almost 40 people were killed in a suicide bomb attack in Ankara in March that was claimed by a Kurdish separatist group.
Coup attempt
A group of Turkish soldiers last month attempted to overthrow the government, commandeering tanks, helicopters and warplanes in an attempted coup that killed 240 people.
The Ankara government has blamed on followers of the US-based exiled religious leader Fethullah Gulen, but Gulen has denied the charge.
Violence flared up in the largely Kurdish southeast in the past week, with bomb attacks leaving 10 people dead in separate attacks, mostly police and soldiers, in an escalation that officials blamed on the PKK.
Turkey’s southeast has been hit by a wave of violence since the collapse of a 2.5-year ceasefire with the PKK in July last year.
The PKK has since carried out dozens of attacks on police and military posts in the southeast of the country.
 |
Source: Al Jazeera and agencies
