Assad spies, Daesh, Kurds behind bombing: Erdogan

ISTANBUL: President Tayyip Erdogan said on Thursday Syrian intelligence and Kurdish militants, not just Daesh, were behind a double suicide bombing in Ankara which killed more than 100 people, the worst attack of its kind in Turkey’s modern history.
Erdogan said Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants, the Syrian “mukhabarat” secret police and the Syrian Kurdish PYD militia had worked together with Daesh in the bombing on Oct. 10.
Turkish authorities have focused their investigation on a home-grown Daesh cell, but the government has been more ambiguous about assigning blame, concerned, its critics say, about how the fallout might impact a general election on Nov. 1.
“This incident shows how terror is implemented collectively. This is a completely collective act of terror and it includes Daesh, PKK, the mukhabarat, and the terrorist group PYD from north of Syria,” Erdogan said.
“They carried out this act all together,” he said in a speech broadcast live on Turkish television at the annual meeting of a labor union in Ankara. Erdogan has often cast threats to Turkey or his own authority as foreign-backed plots.
“Either we’re being protected by the world’s worst intelligence and security agencies or there is blindness and tolerance. Even I know the names of these suicide bombers ... This is a scandal,” Soli Ozel, a columnist and teacher at Kadir Has University, told Turkish news website Diken.
“In such a situation of course you would try to get away with saying Daesh and the PKK did it together. Nobody in the world is taking this thesis seriously.”