The PKK, a Kurdish armed political organization, has claimed responsibility for the suicide attack which struck police headquarters in Ankara, the capital of Turkey, this morning. Two police officers were injured during this attack, while two attackers died. “The villains who threaten the peace and security of citizens have not achieved their objectives and will never achieve them,” President Recep Tayyip Erdogan reacted to the deputies.
“A sacrificial action was committed against the Turkish Interior Ministry by a team dependent on our Brigade of Immortals,” the armed group, considered terrorist by Turkey and several Western countries, told the news agency ANF close to the Kurdish movement. This is the first attack for which the PKK has claimed responsibility since September 2022 when it killed a police officer in Mersin.
Images prohibited from broadcast
This is the first attack for which the PKK has claimed responsibility since September 2022 when it killed a police officer in Mersin. The PKK is at the heart of the controversy between Turkey and Sweden, over the latter’s entry into NATO, which the Turkish Parliament, which resumed its work on Sunday, is supposed to validate after seventeen months of waiting. .
Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya told the press that one of the two Ankara attackers blew himself up and the other was shot “in the head.” The targeted police headquarters, located in the same interior ministry compound, is close to parliament. The high-power explosion was heard several kilometers away: a video recorded by a surveillance camera shows a gray vehicle slowly parking in front of the police headquarters. The front passenger gets out and walks forward, gun in hand, shoots and blows himself up in front of the police officer’s booth on duty.
A second man rushes in turn but disappears from the image before being killed by the police. Ali Yerlikaya called on the press to stop broadcasting images of the attack on social networks. For its part, the Ankara general prosecutor’s office announced the opening of an investigation. He also banned all Turkish media, in particular televisions, from stopping broadcasting images from the scene of the attack.