PKK splinter group claims suicide attack in Turkey’s Bursa

A radical Kurdish militant group is claiming a suicide bombing in Turkey’s former Ottoman capital of Bursa last week, saying the female assailant had failed to reach her intended target.

The attack on Wednesday evening near Bursa’s famed 14th-century Grand Mosque wounded 13 people but caused no fatalities other than the female suicide bomber herself.

The Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (TAK) — a radical splinter group of the better-known Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) — says in a statement on its website that one of its members had carried out the attack.

It says the bomber was a 23-year-old woman named Eser Cali and said the attack was aimed at avenging the Turkish government’s current military operation in the Kurdish-dominated southeast.

But the statement adds that the bomber had detonated her charge and been killed “due an accident before she had reached the target that was to be brought to account for the massacres against our people.”

It does not give details on the nature of the intended target but denies she was planning to attack the Grand Mosque.

— AFP