10 dead, 15 injured in Istanbul tourist district explosion

An explosion in the heart of Istanbul’s historic Sultanahmet tourist district killed at least ten people and wounded 15 on Tuesday and some local media reports said a suicide bomber may have been responsible.

Several bodies lay on the ground in the Sultanahmet square, close to the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia, a major tourist area of Turkey’s most populous city.

“Investigations into the cause of the explosion, the type of explosion and perpetrator or perpetrators are under way”, the Istanbul governor’s office said in a statement quoted by the Dogan news agency.

Speaking in Berlin, Chancellor Angela Merkel said that German nationals were “probably” among the victims.

Turkey’s Dogan news agency reported that at least six Germans, one Norwegian and one Peruvian were among the wounded, and Seoul’s Foreign Ministry told reporters via text message that one South Korean had a finger injury.

Turkey is on alert after 103 people were killed on October 10 when two suicide bombers attacked a crowd of peace activists in the capital Ankara, the bloodiest strike in the country’s modern history.

That attack was initially claimed by a far-left group, but later turned out to have been perpetrated by a woman with suspected Islamist militant links, officials said.

“It was hard to say who was alive or dead”, Koroglu said. TV reports said several were wounded but there was no further detail on the toll.

State-run TRT television are reporting that the blast was likely caused by a suicide bomber. We shook a lot.

“We don’t have all the information yet… but we fear that German citizens could be and probably are also among the victims and injured”, she told reporters.

The blast comes just over a year after a female suicide bomber blew herself up at a police station for tourists off the same square, killing one officer and wounding another. The prosecutor’s office said the attack was carried out by a local Islamic State cell.

Turkey’s actions against ISIS are more recent but have nonetheless made it a target of that terrorist group.

But Turkey is also waging an all-out assault on the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) which has staged dozens of deadly attacks against members of the security forces in the southeast.

“I started running away with my daughter”.

In response to the attack, on their website the Irish department of foreign affairs has strongly advised Irish travellers against “travelling to the border areas between Turkey and Syria in light of the current instability in the region, in particular the provinces of Hatay, Kilis, Gaziantep, Sanliurfa and Mardin”.

Germany’s Foreign Office issued a travel advisory, following the blast.