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ISTANBUL (AFP) - Two people were killed and four
injured when a blast of unknown cause shook a
residential neighborhood in Turkey's biggest city
Istanbul, police said.
Initial investigation at the site of the explosion,
which occurred minutes after midnight in the
district of Pendik, on Istanbul's Asian side, failed
to produce a definite conclusion, the city's police
chief Celalettin Cerrah said.
"We are unable to say whether it was a bomb or not.
The probe is continuing," Cerrah told reporters at
the scene.
"This area does not seem to be a target for
terrorists," he said, raising the possibility of an
explosion in the fuel tank of a vehicle. He did not
elaborate.
The two victims, a woman and her 21-year-old
daughter, were killed while travelling in a car
driven by a third person, who escaped the incident
with injuries, NTV television said.
A local police official, who requested anonymity,
told AFP earlier that the blast "might have been the
result of a traffic accident."
There were conflicting reports about how the blast
happened.
The CNN-Turk news channel said it occurred in a
moving vehicle, while a witness told Star television
that it ripped through a roadside garbage bin and
insisted that it was a bomb.
NTV also said it occurred in a garbage container,
which flew meters (yards) away with the impact of
the explosion.
Police cordoned off the area, where the blast
shattered the windows of residential buildings and
damaged nine cars, sending panicked residents into
the streets in the middle of the night.
An ambulance was seen taking casualties to hospital.
Reports said the blast occurred shortly after the
guests of a wedding party in a restaurant located in
the neighborhood had begun to leave.
A series of explosions, one of them a deadly bomb
attack, have hit Turkey over the past month.
Most recently, nine people were injured Tuesday when
two small blasts of unknown cause ripped through
garbage cans in the popular Mediterranean resort of
Antalya.
The incident followed the bombing of a bus in the
seaside resort of Kusadasi on July 16, which killed
five people, among them a British woman and an Irish
teenager.
The police blamed the attack on the Kurdistan
Workers' Party (PKK), an armed rebel group branded
terrorist by the United States and the European
Union, which has recently stepped up anti-government
violence.
Earlier in July, some 20 people were injured when a
bomb planted in a dustbin in another resort, Cesme,
went off. The attack was claimed by a little known
Kurdish group which the police say is a cover for
PKK attacks on civilians.
Islamic extremists and far-left underground groups
have also carried out bomb attacks in Turkey.
In the deadliest attack in the country so far, 63
people were killed in two sets of twin suicide
bombings in Istanbul in November 2003, blamed on a
local cell of the Al-Qaeda extremist network.
AFP
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