The attack targeted the police headquarters and the Interior Ministry, which are located in a complex of buildings near parliament. Two “terrorists” approached in a van around 9:30 a.m. local time (8:30 a.m. CEST), Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya said on the online service X (formerly Twitter). “One terrorist blew himself up, the other was neutralized.”
Surveillance camera footage showed a gray car slowly parking in front of the police headquarters. You can then see one of the perpetrators jump out of the car with a gun in his hand and trigger the explosion in front of the guard post. A second man also advances, but can no longer be seen because of the clouds of smoke caused by the explosion. The public prosecutor’s office opened an investigation and banned the Turkish media from disseminating images of the attack site.
A few hours after the attack, the PKK claimed responsibility for the attack to the Kurdish news agency ANF, which is close to it. “A sacrificial operation was carried out against the Turkish Interior Ministry by a team subordinate to our Immortal Brigade,” it said.
The banned PKK is at the center of the dispute between Turkey and Sweden, which revolves around the Scandinavian country’s accession to NATO, which Ankara has blocked.
The attack took place a few hours before the start of the new session of the Turkish parliament. In the course of this, Parliament must decide on Sweden’s application for membership, which has been pending since May 2022. Ankara justifies its hesitation, among other things, with allegedly too lax treatment of suspected PKK members in Sweden.
In his speech at the opening of the session, Erdogan spoke of “villains” who threatened the peace and security of citizens in connection with the attack. But the “terrorists” would “never achieve their goals.”
Erdogan also spoke out against the European Union and declared that his country would no longer accept any requirements or conditions for accession from the EU. “We have kept all the promises we made to the EU, but they have kept almost none of theirs,” Erdogan said. Turkey applied to join the European Union in 1999. The accession negotiations that began in 2005 have been on hold since the end of 2016.
Ankara was the scene of a series of serious attacks in 2015 and 2016, for which the PKK and the jihadist militia Islamic State (IS) claimed responsibility.
The most recent attack on Turkish soil until Sunday occurred on November 13, 2022 in Istanbul. Six people were killed and 81 others were injured. The Turkish authorities blamed the PKK for this. The last attack that the PKK claimed responsibility for until Sunday was the killing of a police officer in September 2022 in Mersin, southern Turkey.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) condemned the attack “in the strongest possible terms,” as he wrote on X. “Our solidarity goes out to our Turkish partners,” added Scholz, who also published the message in Turkish a short time later. The Foreign Office updated its security advice for Turkey and called on German citizens to stay away from the site of the attack.
