Auto bomb attack at Turkish police station kills 5

Speaking to Turkish ambassadors in Ankara at their annual meeting, Davutoglu said around 200 IS members were killed in the army’s retaliation for the Istanbul attack.

“After the incident on Tuesday … close to 500 artillery and tank shells were fired on Daesh positions in Syria and Iraq”, Davutoglu said, using an Arabic name for Islamic State.

Yet following a string of deadly attacks by IS inside Turkey in 2015, including a double suicide bombing in Ankara that killed 103 people, Turkey stepped up arrests of jihadists who had built cells inside the country.

A suicide bomber detonated a bomb in the heart of Istanbul’s historic district on Tuesday, killing 10 foreigners ¿ majority German tourists ¿ and wounding 15 other people in the latest in a string of attacks by the Islamic extremists targeting westerners.

It was hit by two major bombings previous year blamed on the group, in the town of Suruc near the Syrian border and in the capital Ankara, the latter killing more than 100 people in the worst attack of its kind on Turkish soil.

The bomber had recently entered Turkey, authorities said, and Interior Minister Efkan Ala confirmed reports he had registered with an Istanbul branch of the Migration Management Authority, providing fingerprints that allowed officials to quickly identify him. “Germany and Turkey are coming even closer together”. The governor’s office said the security forces responded to the attack, but it was not clear if there were any casualties among the rebels.

The Washington InstituteTurkey, a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation military alliance and the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State, has repeatedly said it wants to flush Islamic State from a zone in northern Syria just across its border.

But analysts and diplomats say that at the start of Syria’s almost five-year civil war, Turkey was actively looking for Islamist rebel allies in Syria to further its aim of toppling President Bashar al-Assad.

But the German foreign ministry has advised its nationals to keep away from large groups in public places and tourist attractions in Istanbul.

Russian news agencies said he was suspected of helping send new recruits from Russia to the militant group.

Security forces have arrested dozens of people across Turkey, including three Russian nationals for alleged links to Daesh in the aftermath of the deadly Sultanahmet blast in Istanbul, security sources told Anadolu Agency on Wednesday. Some IS fighters of Russian origin are believed to have left IS to settle in Turkey, families say.

The state government in Brandenburg said a couple aged 71 and 73 from Falkensee, outside Berlin, were killed, while authorities in the western state of Rhineland-Palatinate say a couple from there were killed – the husband was 61 and the wife 59.