Explosions in Turkey kill three

BOMBS exploded in Turkey’s two main cities yesterday, before a visit by the United States president to Ankara and a NATO summit in Istanbul. Three people were killed and at least 18 were injured.

The first bomb went off outside a hotel in Ankara where George Bush will be staying tomorrow.

The second was detonated on a bus on the streets of Istanbul, the host city of the summit next week where Mr Bush will be joined by other world leaders, including Tony Blair.

The White House said the president’s schedule would not be changed.

Istanbul’s governor, Muammer Guler, said the bomber in the commercial capital of Istanbul was a woman carrying the device in her lap when it exploded on board a bus outside a hospital in the residential Fatih district.

"The bus was not the target," he said. "The bomb was being carried from one place to another. We suspect a Marxist-Leninist group."

The blast killed three people, including the bomber, and injured 15, according to a surgeon at the hospital treating casualties.

Police detained three suspects, the state-run Anatolian news agency said. Two men and a woman were believed to have been aboard the bus when the explosion occurred.

A small explosive device went off earlier outside the Hilton Hotel in Ankara where Mr Bush is due to stay before he leaves on Sunday for Istanbul.

A leftist group called MLKP-FESK claimed responsibility for the explosion, a television station said.

Ankara’s police chief, Ercument Yilmaz, said two policemen and an unidentified third person were injured in that blast.

The Turkish government, which hosts the NATO summit in Istanbul on Monday and Tuesday, offered swift reassurance after the Ankara explosion that security for the heads-of-state meeting was adequate.

"Turkey is a sufficiently strong and secure country. Such incidents happen everywhere - in London, in Paris, everywhere," the foreign minister, Abdullah Gul, said.

Turkey has taken drastic security precautions in Istanbul, fearing a repetition of four devastating lorry bombs in November that killed more than 60. Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for those attacks on Jewish and British sites.

Police yesterday carried out controlled explosions of suspicious packages in Ankara and near the summit area in Istanbul. In the western town of Yalova, bomb disposal experts destroyed a bag containing a home-made pipe bomb.

"There have been other blasts today, but it might be wrong to connect this to the summit," the police chief, Celalettin Cerrah, said at the scene of the Istanbul blast.

Home-grown groups, including Islamists, far-leftists and Kurdish separatists, have struck in Turkey in the past. A Europe-wide security sweep in April targeted Turkey’s largest left-wing faction, the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front, responsible for suicide bomb attacks in Ankara last year and in Istanbul in 2001.

Mr Bush is to spend tomorrow night in Ankara before talks on Sunday with the prime minister, Tayyip Erdogan, and president, Ahmet Necdet Sezer.

He flies to Istanbul on Sunday afternoon to attend the two-day NATO summit with 40 other world leaders.

AWACS surveillance planes will circle above the city of ten million people as 24,000 officers police the streets.