Suspected bomb blast in residential area of Istanbul kills two people, injures four

Police claim explosion may have been accident but media, recent similar events suggest otherwise

ISTANBUL (AFP) - Two women were killed and four other people injured when a blast — possibly caused by a bomb — shook a residential neighborhood in Turkey’s biggest city, Istanbul, early yesterday, police and media reports said.

The blast ripped through a roadside garbage container in the district of Pendik, on Istanbul’s Asian side, shattering windows of nearby buildings, damaging cars and sending panicked residents into the streets shortly after midnight.

“There are allegations that it was a bomb but the teams working on the site have not reached a definite conclusion yet,” an official from Istanbul police’s anti-terror department told AFP on condition of anonymity.

He confirmed that the blast, which followed a string of similar explosions in other parts of Turkey, occurred in a garbage container.

“It might have also been a gas buildup or something else,” he said.

A senior security official, quoted by the Anatolia news agency, confirmed that the police were considering the possibility of a bomb, but added that investigators had so far failed to discover any traces of explosives or a detonator.

The two victims — a 50-year-old woman and her daughter in her early 20s — were killed in the blast as their car passed by, reports said, adding that the woman’s son, who was driving the vehicle, escaped with injuries. The family was believed to have been among a group of guests who were leaving a wedding party in a restaurant located in the neighborhood.

The NTV news channel and the mass-selling Hurriyet newspaper reported that a bomb planted in the garbage container triggered the blast.

Istanbul police chief Celalettin Cerrah told reporters shortly after the incident that the initial investigation at the site had failed to produce a definite conclusion.

“This area does not seem to be a target for terrorists,” he said, raising the possibility of an explosion in the fuel tank of a vehicle. He did not elaborate.

Police cordoned off the area and ambulances were rushed to the site to take casualties to hospital.

A series of explosions, one of them a deadly bomb attack, have hit Turkey over the past month.

Most recently, nine people were injured Tuesday when two small blasts of unknown cause ripped through garbage cans in the popular Mediterranean resort of Antalya.

The incident followed the bombing of a bus in the seaside resort of Kusadasi on July 16, which killed five people, among them a British woman and an Irish teenager.

The police blamed the attack on the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), an armed rebel group branded terrorist by the United States and the European Union, which has recently stepped up anti-government violence.

Earlier in July, some 20 people were injured when a bomb planted in a dustbin in another resort, Cesme, went off.

Meanwhile, Turkish security forces killed two armed rebels of the outlawed PKK in ongoing security operations in the east and southeast of the country, local officials and the Anatolia news agency said yesterday.