Turkish Police Arrest 59 After Istanbul Bomb

Turkish authorities arrested a number of suspected Islamic State militants during raids Wednesday, including three Russian nationals.

Virtually all Turkish newspapers dedicated their front pages Wednesday to the terrorist attack that killed 10 people in Istanbul’s historic Sultanahmet Square.

Singapore’s President Tony Tan Keng Yam, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and Minister for Foreign Affairs Vivian Balakrishnan have condemned Tuesday’s (Jan 12) bomb attack in Istanbul in letters to Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and Minister of Foreign Affairs Mevlut Cavusoglu respectively.

Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus had previously said the perpetrator was born in 1988 and was a Syrian national, but the private Dogan news agency claimed the bomber was Saudi-born.

Turkey has been hit by a string of deadly attacks blamed on jihadists over the a year ago, including a double suicide bombing in October in Ankara that killed more than 100 people.

Turkey, a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation member and candidate for accession to the European Union, is part of a US-led coalition against Islamic State fighters who have seized territory in neighbouring Syria and Iraq, some of it directly abutting Turkey.

Turkey suffered two major bombing attacks previous year.

The Turkish military said Sunday that a total of 448 PKK militants had been killed in counter-terrorism operations in southeastern Turkey, where tensions have been running high, since mid-December.

The Istanbul bombing happened shortly after a visit to Ankara by EU commissioner Frans Timmermans, for talks on implementation of an EU-Turkey plan to reduce migrant flows.

The arrests were made after an IS suicide bomber killed 11 people in central Istanbul yesterday, but the reports did not make clear if there was any connection.

Another 15 people were wounded, a lot of them Germans but also Norwegians, Peruvians and at least one Turk. He had recently entered Turkey from Syria as a refugee, according to the Turkish migration office.

Eight Germans were among the dead and nine others were wounded, some seriously, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier told reporters in Berlin.

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.

On Wednesday, three more suspected ISIS members were detained in the southern resort city of Antalya.

Speaking from Istanbul on Tuesday, Berkay Mandiraci, researcher at the International Crisis Group, said the latest attack was another blow to the Turkish population.

Senior Research Analyst at Euromonitor International Kinda Chebib, a London-based market intelligence firm, said the attack is expected to “impact negatively on inbound flow to Turkey on the short-to-medium term”.