Turkey bombing: government blames Islamic State

Two bomb explosions targeting a peace rally in Turkey’s capital Ankara on Saturday killed at least 30 people and injured 126 others, Turkey’s Interior Ministry said.

But a Turkish newspaper that often serves as a mouthpiece for the country’s government reported investigators are comparing the the DNA of the dead bombers with that of 20 extremists – a few of them ISIS militants – who they believe could have carried out the attacks.

“It was definitely a suicide bombing”, Davutoglu said in an interview broadcast live on Turkey’s NTV. “We’re close to a name, which points to one group”, he said.

The two explosions occurred seconds apart as hundreds of opposition supporters and Kurdish activists gathered for the peace rally.

Pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), one of the rally’s organizers, called the blasts an “attack by the state against the people”.

It said that the attack, the deadliest in the history of modern Turkey, had claimed the lives of 97 people, raising slightly the previous toll of 95.

Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, however, rejected accusations by opponents that the government was to blame for the almost simultaneous attacks Saturday, calling them “dangerous” and “dastardly”.

Thousands of mourners filled the streets of Ankara Sunday and vented their anger at President Recep Tayyip Erdogan after 97 people were killed in the country’s worst-ever terror attack, while the government raced to identify the two male suicide bombers it blamed for the bloodshed. A pro-Kurdish party has said up to 128 people died.

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Riot police with water cannon and armored vehicles stood by as the crowd, a few chanting “Thief, Murderer Erdogan” and waving HDP flags, moved towards the mosque in the working class Umraniye neighborhood of Istanbul.

Turkey has suffered a spiral of violence since July, when a similar suicide bombing killed 33 Turkish and Kurdish activists in a town near the Syrian border, ending a cease-fire.

Nobody has claimed responsibility for the bombings.

The increasing signals of possible Islamic State links to Saturday’s bloodshed – which killed almost 100 people – has raised pressure on Turkey’s government before elections November 1 with critics demanding more steps to keep Syria’s civil war from spilling over into Turkey.

Hours after the attack, Kurdish rebels battling Turkish security forces followed through with plans to declare a unilateral ceasefire in an attempt to reduce tensions before the election.

Before the widely expected ceasefire was announced, Deputy Prime Minister Yalcin Akdogan had dismissed it as a “tactic” ahead of the election, reiterating government demands that the militants lay down arms and leave Turkey.