Tests identify driver of lorry used in Istanbul blast

Published on Saturday 29 November 2003 00:00

TURKISH authorities yesterday said DNA tests had revealed the identity of one of the suicide bombers in this month’s spate of attacks in Istanbul, which killed 61 people and wounded hundreds more.

A second man was named in a Turkish newspaper as being responsible for the attack on the British consul.

Security officials in south-east Turkey said Habib Aktas, a Turkish national long suspected of militant Islamic leanings, was driving the lorry laden with explosives that exploded outside the Istanbul headquarters of the London-based bank HSBC on 20 November.

A total of 32 people were killed in the two blasts.

Five days earlier, attacks on two Istanbul synagogues killed 29 people. Police have identified the synagogue bombers as two Turkish nationals, Mesut Cabuk and Gokhan Elaltuntas.

Groups with links to Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network have said they were responsible for all four bombings.

"It became clear that Aktas was the bomber after a blood sample taken from his father matched his," a security officer said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Police detained his father and two brothers, and they were taken to Istanbul for questioning, the official said.

Dozens of others remain in police custody in connection with the bombings and 20 people have been charged with belonging to and aiding and abetting an illegal organisation.

Six people sent to the state security court yesterday were released without charge, the Anatolian news agency said.

Aktas, 27, came from Savur, a town of 7,000 in Mardin province near the Syrian border. He had been detained in the past for suspected ties to Hizbullah, a militant group that is not connected to the Lebanon-based organisation Hezbollah.

Authorities said Aktas had moved to Istanbul, where his wife and two young children remain.

Aktas’s marriage portrait depicts a woman wearing an Islamic-style headscarf and a mustachioed man with soft black eyes and a youthful face.

"I can’t approve of these events. It was a terrible thing," Aktas’s uncle, Besir Aktas, said, adding that the young militant had been estranged from his family.

His fellow bombers, Cabuk and Elaltuntas, were buried last week in their home town of Bingol, a hotbed of fundamentalism in the 1990s.

Newspapers have said another Bingol man was the fourth suicide bomber, although police have yet to release his name.

Turkey’s Milliyet newspaper named Feridun Ugurlu, a Turk believed to have fought with Islamic radicals in Afghanistan and Chechnya, as the driver of an explosive-laden pick-up truck that crashed into the British consulate in a nearly simultaneous attack.

Police neither confirmed nor denied the Milliyet report identifying Ugurlu as the fourth suicide bomber.

Police have raided several suspects’ houses in the wake of the bombings, confiscating two handguns and two single-shot "pen guns" along with four shotguns and sniper’s binoculars. They also seized bomb-making material, tear gas, ski masks, 20 wireless radios, cameras and documents in Arabic, Istanbul’s deputy police chief, Halil Yilmaz, said.

Turkish officials have said all four suicide bombers were Turkish nationals and militants with international contacts. Newspapers have said some of them could have been trained in al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan or Iran.

Set in the lush green Mardin hills, Savur and surrounding farming villages were scenes of clashes in the 1980s and 1990s between Turkish security officers and Kurdish separatists. More than 30,000 people, mainly Kurds, died in the insurgency.

Most residents in Mardin province are ethnic Kurds or Arabs.

"Like the rest of Turkey, we are very saddened about the attacks in Istanbul. "If only Savur’s name had not been connected to these events," said Halit Celik, a shopkeeper in Savur.