“They turned our wedding into a bloodbath,” said bride Besna
Akdogan on Sunday as she left hospital after a suicide bombing killed 51 people
at her wedding in southeastern Turkey.
The funerals of some of the victims took
place, meanwhile, with feelings running high in the town of Gaziantep near the
Syrian border where hundreds gathered following Saturday’s bombing. Shouts of
“shame on you, Erdogan” rang out as others threw water bottles at police, amid
anger at the president for not doing more to prevent the attack on a Kurdish
wedding which the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) said the Islamic
State group had threatened to carry out.
A lawmaker from President Recep Erdogan’s Ruling Justice and
Development Party for Gaziantep had hoped to attend the funerals but pulled out
when the extent of the anger became clear. “I lost my children, now I will
never see them again,” wailed one woman confronted with the sight of rows of
freshly dug graves. Erdogan said earlier that the attack — the deadliest in
2016 — had involved a child aged between 12 and 14, adding that IS was the
likely perpetrator of the bombing on a wedding that had many Kurdish guests.
– Suicide vest –
People react as they stand around coffins during a funeral for victims of last night’s
attack on a wedding party that left 50 dead in Gaziantep in southeastern Turkey
near the Syrian border on August 21, 2016. At least 50 people were killed when
a suspected suicide bomber linked to Islamic State jihadists attacked a wedding
thronged with guests, officials said on August 21. Turkish President Recep
Tayyip Erdogan said the IS extremist group was the “likely perpetrator” of the
bomb attack, the deadliest in 2016, in Gaziantep late Saturday that targeted a
celebration attended by many Kurds.
With 69 people still in hospital, 17 in a
critical condition, the HDP said warnings about IS’s growing foothold in
Gaziantep had fallen on deaf ears. IS see Kurds as enemies due to the prominent
role of Kurdish militias in fighting the jihadists.
“Over the years, step by step, Gaziantep became a host for
IS. For a long time, people who lived in the province said IS was building up a
presence,” it said in a statement. After twin suicide bombings targeting a
pro-Kurdish peace rally in Ankara in October 2015 killed 103 people, IS had
warned it would attack a Kurdish wedding, it added. “Unfortunately, the
political powers did not take the necessary steps to prevent these plans
despite warnings,” it said. The remains of a suicide vest were found at the
scene on Sunday, according to the chief prosecutor’s office. An AFP
photographer who visited the scene found body parts still strewn across the
ground along with victims’ belongings. In a room of a house near to where the
bomber struck, debris could be seen everywhere with windows flung open and
walls pockmarked with bomb damage. At local hospitals, relatives of the injured
gathered to await news of their loved ones. Some fainted in the heat as they
struggled to comprehend the scale of the loss of life. The bombing is the
seventh major attack in Turkey this year blamed on either IS or The Kurdistan
Freedom Falcons (TAK), a radical offshoot of the rebel Kurdistan Workers’ Party
(PKK).
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