Pro-Kurd party members arrested in wake of Istanbul bombings
ISTANBUL — Turkish authorities arrested more than 200 people Monday following suicide bombings near an Istanbul stadium that killed 44 people. The arrests primarily targeted members of a Kurdish political party that already was a focus of a broader government crackdown.
Saturday’s attack, which a radical Kurdish group claimed as an act of revenge for state violence against the ethnic minority in the southeast, was the deadliest to hit Istanbul this year.
Authorities blamed the carnage on the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. A shadowy offshoot of the movement, which has waged a decades-long insurgency against the state, claimed responsibility for the attack on a website that is blocked in Turkey.
“This is definitely a repercussion of the current crackdown on the Kurdish people,” said Cenk Sidar, president of Sidar Global Advisors, a risk advisory group in Washington. “It seems likely (PKK) will go ahead with these high-casualty, low-cost attacks for them, and it is a very dangerous trend in the country.”