Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan arrived in Bali, Indonesia, for the G20 meeting on Monday, only hours after his home city of Istanbul was shaken by an explosion blamed on Kurdish rebels.
Before leaving Turkey, Erdogan said the “vile attack” that murdered at least six people in the city’s core had the “smell of terror.”
An explosion ripped through a busy Istanbul retail street, killing six people and injuring hundreds more.
Police cordoned off an area around Istiklal, where there were dense crowds on Sunday afternoon, and helicopters flew over the city centre as sirens sounded.
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Turkey’s interior minister accused the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) of responsibility.
Since the 1980s, the PKK has maintained a deadly insurgency for Kurdish self-rule in southeastern Turkey, despite being designated as a terrorist organization by Ankara and its Western supporters.
“The person who put the device has been caught,” said Suleyman Soylu, interior minister, in a statement carried by the official Anadolu news agency.
The group is regularly targeted by Turkish military operations, and it is also at the center of a squabble between Sweden and Turkey, which has been stalling Stockholm’s entrance into NATO since May, accusing it of being too lenient toward the PKK
