Three police officers were killed and 170 people wounded by a car bomb at a police station in Turkey’s eastern city of Elazig on Thursday, the local governor’s office said, hours after a similar attack killed three people elsewhere in the region.
Footage on the CNN Turk channel showed offices inside the police station in ruins and filled with smoke after the bomb exploded just outside the complex at 9:20 a.m. (0620 GMT), when officers had already begun arriving for work.
No one immediately claimed responsibility, but Defence Minister Fikri Isik told the state-run Anadolu Agency that the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), deemed a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and the European Union, was behind the attack.
“We have seen once more … that the PKK is a bloody organization and does not hesitate to kill the people it says it is fighting for,” he said. “The PKK acts according to the demands of global powers, not … the people in the region.”
Prime Minister Binali Yildirim canceled his day’s schedule and was heading to Elazig with Isik and General Hulusi Akar, head of the armed forces, sources at Yildirim’s office said.
The provincial governor’s office said 14 of the wounded were in serious condition.
The PKK has carried out dozens of attacks on police and military posts since 2015 in the largely Kurdish southeast in its fight for greater autonomy for Turkey’s 15 million Kurds.
But Elazig, a conservative province that votes in large numbers for the ruling AK Party, had been spared violence until now.
Video footage showed a plume of black smoke rising above the city after the blast, which uprooted trees and gouged a large crater outside the police complex, located on a busy thoroughfare in the city of 420,000 people.
In Van province, further east, two police officers and one civilian were killed and 73 people were wounded late on Wednesday when a car bomb exploded near a police station, the local governor’s office said in a statement.
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