Turkey detains three Russians suspected of Islamic State ties after Istanbul bomb

Davutoglu said on Wednesday he was a member of Isis who had entered Turkey from Syria as a refugee.

Turkey’s interior minister said on Wednesday the suicide bomber was not on any wanted list but had registered with Turkey’s immigration authorities.

Germany sent a team of investigators to Istanbul on Wednesday from its Federal Criminal Police Office, to support Turkish authorities investigating the attack.

Germany’s interior minister says there are no indications so far that Germans were specifically targeted in the attack in Istanbul.

He said Turkey, which has repeatedly called on foreign intelligence agencies to do more to prevent would-be jihadists from travelling to its shores, had detained 3,318 people for suspected links to Islamic State and other radical groups since Syria’s conflict began.

Davutoglu said the security forces had detained four people suspected of links to the suicide bomber, and that six of those wounded were still in hospital.

Police also seized documents and CDs during a search of the premises where the Russian suspects were staying, according to one news agency.

Three Russians were also arrested on Wednesday in the coastal city of Antalya. He said Turkey had detained as many as 220 IS suspects in the week prior to the attack.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his government have said publicly that about 2,000 Russians are believed to be fighting with ISIS in Syria and Iraq, many of them from the Caucasus region in Russia’s southwest, where the government has battled Islamist insurgents for decades.

Earlier, Turkey’s interior minister had announced the arrest of another person. The operations have resulted in more than a hundred civilian casualties, and displaced thousands, human rights groups say.

The blast killed 10 German tourists and wounded several other people.

The Turkish leader said Ankara made a decision to hit the Islamic State group as soon as it had determined that it was responsible for the “heinous” bombing at Istanbul’s main tourist district, just steps away from the landmark Blue Mosque.

Tuesday’s suicide bombing in Sultanahmet Square was a strike at the heart of Turkey’s culture and its multibillion-dollar tourist industry.

The coordinated attacks in Paris by Islamic State-affiliated terrorists, including two who allegedly traveled to Europe posing as refugees, have sparked alarm in the Europe and the U.S. Some politicians have suggested that their countries only accept Christian refugees. Media said the dead included the wife of a police officer and a 5-month-old baby, who were killed in the police lodgings, and two children, who died in the collapsed house.