The armed wing of the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK) has denied any role in an attack on a main Istanbul shopping street, shortly after Turkish officials blamed Kurdish militants for the deadly blast.
Six people died and 81 were injured when a bomb struck Istanbul’s popular pedestrian thoroughfare İstiklal Avenue, timed to strike when it was most crowded. Turkey’s justice minister, Bekir Bozdağ, said that “a woman sat on a bench there for 45 minutes”, and that the explosion occurred moments after she left.
