Turkey removes high police officers from posts after Ankara terror attacks

Condolences from around the world are continuing to pour into Turkey following Saturday’s horrific twin bombings in Ankara that killed at least 97 people.

KENYON: Since the attack, chants of Murderer Erdogan, referring to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, have been heard at rallies and funerals across Turkey. He has ordered a top-level investigation into the bombings.

Bulent Kusoglu, an Ankara MP for the opposition CHP party, tweeted: “A president steps up, at times when the nation and society go through difficulties, to be a uniting and reassuring force”. According to preliminary information, the terrorist organization “Islamic State” (IS) stands behind the attack.

The organisers of the rally, the Confederation of Progressive Labour Unions (DİSK), the Public Workers Labour Unions Confederation (KESK), the Chamber of Engineers and Architects (TMMOB) and the Turkish Medical Association (TTB), issued a joint statement convening a two-day general strike beginning yesterday and continuing today.

Switzerland’s Foreign Ministry is warning its citizens traveling to Turkey to be “alert and careful” in the wake of the weekend’s bombing attacks in Istanbul. “Legal action can not be taken until the realisation of the criminal act”, he told a Turkish television channel.

Many of those killed in the attack – which the government says may have been carried out by Islamic State jihadists – were HDP members, including two of its candidates for parliament.

“The entire country has understood his intentions”, he said.

The government, meanwhile, raised the death toll in Turkey’s deadliest attack in years to 97 and said the victims included a Palestinian.

“This should have been obvious to the authorities but they attacked us with [tear] gas bombs and plastic bullets while we were helping the injured”.

Mr Erdogan has admitted there were security shortcomings, but said their magnitude would only be made clear later. However, a recent survey by Metropoll found that the AKP would only increase its vote by 1 percent-and that was before the suicide bombing.

The rally had been organized by the trade union movement in collaboration with pro-Kurdish activists to protest about the current AKP-dominated interim government’s escalation of the conflict against the PKK in the country’s southeast.

The expert said the double suicide attacks committed October 10 in Ankara is the result of Ankara’s policy.

The attack happened three weeks before Turkish elections and the Prime Minister claims the attack was an attempt to cast a shadow on the event. Whatever his calculation, he appeared to have two overriding priorities: toppling Syrian President Bashar Assad – the client of Iran’s Shia rulers who since 2011 has been slaughtering his country’s Sunnis – and eliminating Kurdish forces in Syria lest they encourage Turkey’s large Kurdish minority to consider self-rule a realistic possibility for themselves as well.

One of the main leaders of the HDP, Selahattin Demirtas, whose party was one of the main sponsors of the Ankara peace demonstration, very bluntly blamed the attack and others like it, as well as right wing riots which attacked the HDP headquarters and the anti-government Hurriyet newspaper in Istanbul on September 8, on the government.