Istanbul Terrorist Attack: Six Dead, Dozens Injured, Suspect Arrested

By Staff, Agencies

The person who left the bomb that caused Istanbul's explosion was arrested by the police, Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu said on Monday.

Turkey’s interior minister has accused the Kurdistan’s Workers’ party [PKK] of responsibility for a bombing in a busy Istanbul shopping thoroughfare that killed six people, and said that a suspect had been arrested, the Guardian reported.

A suspect has been arrested, the minister noted in a statement broadcast by the official Anadolu news agency on Monday. “According to our findings, the PKK terrorist organization is responsible,” he said.

According to state news agency Anadolu, Turkish Vice President Fuat Oktay said Sunday that the incident has been deemed a terrorist attack. “We consider it to be a terrorist act as a result of an attacker, whom we consider to be a woman, detonating the bomb,” Oktay told reporters.

Six people died and 81 were injured when Istanbul’s popular pedestrian thoroughfare istiklal Avenue in Taksim Square was hit by a bomb attack that Turkey’s president described as an act of terrorism.

CCTV footage shows a woman sitting on a bench for more than 40 minutes and then getting up one or two minutes before the explosion, leaving a bag or plastic bag behind, according to Turkish Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag.