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Three die in new attack on Turkish tourist areas |
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Written by Reuters
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Monday, 28 August 2006 16:08 |
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A bomb blast killed three people and wounded dozens in the coastal city Antalya on Monday in a second day of attacks on Turkish tourist resorts apparently designed to scare off foreigners and hit the economy.
"Nothing in Turkey will be as it was before," the shadowy Kurdistan Liberation Hawks (TAK) said on its Web site.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for Monday's attack in Antalya, a Mediterranean tourist hub.
Local people are concerned Turkey's $18 billion tourist industry, a powerful motor of the economy, may be further damaged by the attacks, the latest in a string of bombings in the past year. Security was stepped up in resort areas.
Witnesses told they heard a loud bang which broke windows, sent shrapnel flying into people and sparked a fire at a shopping area in the heart of the city.
"I saw two wounded tourists and the burned body of a dead man, a pastry vendor," said holidaying journalist Riza Ozel.
The Antalya blast occurred less than 24 hours after three bombs in Marmaris wounded 21 people within 15 minutes and a device in Istanbul wounded six people.
In the major port city of Izmir on Monday police detained a PKK suspect over a planned an attack there and seized plastic explosives, the state agency Anatolian reported.
Television images from Antalya showed damaged shops, mangled bicycles on the street, crowds gathering and men carrying wounded people.
In Marmaris, 10 Britons and six Turks were wounded when a bomb exploded under a seat in a minibus in a street crowded with bars and restaurants around midnight.
"Who did this? What do they want from these people?" Suzanne Bedford, whose two grandchildren were being treated at the Ahu Hetman hospital in Marmaris, asked an official.
Officials pledged to find the culprits, suspected of belonging to the PKK rebel group, which has waged a more than 20-year campaign to carve out a homeland in Turkey's mainly Kurdish southeast.
General Yasar Buyukanit, who took over as chief of general staff at a ceremony on Monday, said separatist terrorism would be defeated. The army is stepping up attacks on the PKK and the rebel group has offered a conditional ceasefire.
There was muted impact on Turkish financial markets, but one Marmaris hotel owner said cancellations had started to flow in.
Antalya photographic shop owner Mesut Isik was pessimistic. "The tourists have already been few this season and from now on none will come. Shops have no option but to close," he said.
German tourism firm Thomas Cook said clients who had booked a trip to Turkey could change their reservations free of charge.
Antalya and Marmaris are popular with European and Russian tourists as well as Turks. Millions of foreigners flock to the long Turkish coastline each summer.
"I condemn this wave of barbaric and cowardly attacks which occurred in the past 24 hours in Turkey,"
European Union Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn said in a statement. Turkey is seeking EU membership.
Kurdish separatists, leftists and Islamic militants have carried out bomb attacks in Turkey in the past.
The PKK launched a separatist campaign in 1984 and Ankara blames it for the death of more than 30,000 people. The United States, the EU and Turkey consider it a terrorist organization.
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