Blast targets Turkey court
A police officer and a court worker were killed when a car bomb exploded outside a courthouse in the western Turkish city of Izmir yesterday, state-run news agency reported.
At least 11 people were wounded, Dogan news agency reported, after the blast outside the prosecutors and judges' entrance in the usually peaceful city on the Aegean Sea.
Police shot dead two attackers and were searching for a third, sources said.
The bombing comes less than a week after a gunman shot dead 39 people at a nightclub in Istanbul on New Year's Day in an attack claimed by Islamic State. The gunman is still at large.
There has so far been no claim of responsibility for the latest bombing after a year of bloodshed in the Muslim-majority Nato member.
But Izmir governor Erol Ayyildiz said that initial evidence suggested the PKK -- which has fought a deadly insurgency for over three decades -- was behind the attack, rather than IS.
Police detained 20 suspected Islamic State militants thought to be of Central Asian and North African origin in Izmir on Wednesday, in raids Turkish media said were linked to the Istanbul nightclub attack.
The man who killed 39 people in an attack on an Istanbul nightclub on New Year's Day is probably an ethnic Uighur and Turkish security services now know where he might be hiding, Deputy Prime Minister Veysi Kaynak said yesterday.
Kaynak described the man as a "specially trained" member of a cell who carried out the attack alone and said that while the possibility of him fleeing abroad could not be ruled out, security operations inside Turkey were more likely to find him.
The suspect, who authorities have not named, shot his way into exclusive Istanbul nightclub Reina early on Sunday and opened fire with an automatic rifle, throwing stun grenades to allow himself to reload and shooting the wounded on the ground.
Turkey faces multiple security threats. It has been hit by a series of bombings over the past 18 months, some of them blamed on Islamic State, others on Kurdish militants.
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