Hours after an explosion – in a bustling avenue of Turkey’s Istanbul – killed a minimum of six individuals, a bombing suspect has been arrested. Turkey’s inside minister Suleyman Soylu on Monday stated the particular person is believed to have planted the bomb, in response to state-run Anadolu company.

Soylu accused the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) of inflicting the bomb assault. “According to our findings, the PKK terrorist organisation is responsible,” he was quoted as saying by information company AFP.

Earlier, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan stated the bomb assault “smells like terrorism”. Furthermore, he and the nation’s vice chairman, Faut Oktay, had stated {that a} “woman” bomber was chargeable for the assault.

Besides six individuals getting killed, 81 others had been wounded in Sunday’s incident when an explosion rocked the busy pedestrian avenue.

Video footage that surfaced online quickly after the explosion confirmed lots of of individuals fleeing the road after black smoke coated the area, as ambulances and police rushed there. The place was crowded with vacationers, households and consumers in its normal method.

Following the blast, a number of individuals had been seen mendacity on the bottom as others ran away, with mother and father grabbing their kids of their arms.

Authorities later knowledgeable {that a} Turkish authorities ministry employee and his daughter had been among the many lifeless. Five individuals amongst these injured had been shifted to intensive care in a hospital, with two of them being in a crucial situation, information company Reuters reported.

Erdogan instructed a information convention that efforts to “defeat Turkey and the Turkish people through terrorism will fail today just as they did yesterday and as they will tomorrow”.

“Our people can rest assured that the culprits… will be punished as they deserve,” he was quoted as saying by Reuters.

Meanwhile, Anadolu reported Turkish justice minister Bekir Bozdag as saying {that a} lady had sat on a bench on the street for over 40 minutes earlier than leaving minutes earlier than the blast, implying a bomb was timed to blow up or was detonated from afar.

Messages of condemnations of the assault and condolences for the victims have poured in from a number of nations, together with Ukraine, Britain, Italy, Egypt and Greece, amongst others.

No one has claimed accountability of the assault up to now.

Twin bombings had hit an Istanbul soccer stadium in December 2016, through which as many as 38 individuals had been killed and 155 injured. An offshoot of the PKK – designated as a terrorist group by Turkey, the US and the European Union (EU) – had claimed accountability then.