Turkey detains 68 IS suspects in nationwide raids

Ten Germans were killed in the bombing, a spokeswoman for the German foreign ministry said, raising the death toll among Germans from 9 previously.

In Ankara, the authorities detained 16 people who were suspected of planning a major attack in the capital, the report said.

The newspaper also carried a photograph of the suspected bomber, identified as Nabil Fadli, a Syrian national born in Saudi Arabia.

Images from the scene on Tuesday showed several bloody corpses lying on the ground close to the iconic Ottoman-era Blue Mosque in Sultanahmet, a district home to Istanbul’s biggest concentration of historic monuments.

Germany warned its nationals to avoid tourist sites in Istanbul, a city of about 14 million people that has been hit several times in the past by deadly attacks. The sound of the call to prayer rang out from the Blue Mosque as forensic police officers worked at the scene. Ala confirmed reports that the bomber had registered with a refugee agency, providing fingerprints that allowed officials to quickly identify him, but said the suicide bomber wasn’t on any Turkish or global watch lists for IS militants.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the Istanbul blast but Islamist, leftist and Kurdish militants, who are battling Ankara in southeast Turkey, have all carried out attacks in the past.

Police cordon off Sultanahmet Square after an explosion here in Istanbul, Turkey, January 12, 2016.

The Istanbul attack, targeting groups of tourists as they wandered around the square, appeared to mark a change in Islamic State’s tactics against Turkey.

Turkey detained 68 suspected members of the Islamic State group in raids across the country on Tuesd … Nine Germans were also injured.

The minister also said that there was no reason for German people to cancel their tourism-related visits to Turkey. “Eleven people, including the suicide bomber died during the attack”.

Turkey stepped up its fight against Islamic State past year, after a period in which it was criticized for being slow to tackle the threat from the extremist group.

Turkish tour guide Sibel Satiroglu told the police she saw the moment the bomber detonated himself after blending into a group of 33 German citizens visiting the Obelisk of Theodosius, one of the city’s most eye-catching sites.

The attack left 10 tourists dead, all foreigners, and like other terrorist strikes in recent months in Paris, Beirut, Mali, Egypt and Baghdad, it resonated far beyond Turkey as civilians were again cut down while going about their daily lives.