A terrorist bomb attack on Sunday caused at least 6 deaths and 81 injuries, two of them in serious condition, in the central Istiklal street in Istanbul, Turkish Vice President Fuat Oktay confirmed at a press conference.
“For now we have a total of six dead, four of them died in the same place of the events. There are 81 injured, of which two are in serious condition,” Oktay said.
“We are evaluating that it was a terrorist attack committed by a woman who detonated a bomb,” he added.
Shortly before, the president of Turkey, the conservative Islamist Recep Tayyip Erdogan, had already announced that the incident was very likely a terrorist attack.
“There are people who have been killed in a bomb attack at 4:20 p.m. (1:20 p.m. GMT) in Istiklal. I offer my condolences to the dead and my wishes for recovery to the injured. The state will find the organizers of this terrorist attack,” Erdogan said in an appearance on TRT public television.
“The people can be sure that the aggressors will be punished. Four people died at the scene and two in the hospital,” added the president.
Erdogan was speaking moments before leaving for Indonesia, where the G20 heads of state summit will start on Tuesday.
“If we say that it is definitely a terrorist act, we can be wrong. But from what the governor (of Istanbul, Ali Yerlikaya) has told me, it looks like terrorism. A woman is believed to be involved. But a final decision will be made after the investigation », he clarified.
Istiklal Street, a pedestrian avenue full of shops, which starts at the emblematic Taksim Square, is full of passers-by at all hours, including many tourists.
The Turkish broadcasting authority has decreed a “temporary ban” on broadcasting images of the scene and giving information about possible suspects, except for statements by authorities, so as not to hinder the ongoing investigation.
A football match that was to take place between Besiktas and Antalyaspor, in the former’s home stadium, located just 700 meters from Taksim, has been postponed to another date, reports the Turkish Football Federation (TFF) on its website. .
However, both tram and metro lines in the Taksim area and surrounding neighborhoods were operating normally shortly after the attack, local residents reported.
In 2016 there were several terrorist attacks in Turkey, most of them from networks of the Islamic State jihadist group, in Istanbul, one of them in Istiklal street itself.
However, after the massacre caused by a jihadist on New Year’s Eve of that year in a nightclub on the banks of the Bosphorus, there were no more attacks in the city.
