ISTANBUL, 3 July 2005 — A bomb explosion yesterday killed six people and injured eight others on a passenger train in eastern Turkey, the national railway said. Reports of a second bomb attack derailing another train, which was coming to the aid of victims of the first, could not be confirmed. The first bomb, which went off midmorning near the town of Suveren, derailed the engine, a passenger and one freight carriage, killing six railway employees and injuring eight passengers, a Turkish National Railway Company (TCDD) spokesman Mehmet Ayci said.
“All the injured, including some in a serious condition, were transported by military helicopter to the hospital in Genc,” Ayci said, adding there were no other people in the overturned carriage and engine. The 15 carriage train, including three passenger wagons and the rest freight, was carrying around 45 passengers and 11 railway workers from Elazig to Tavan, when the bomb exploded between the towns of Genc and Suveren in Bingol province.
“The bomb, planted on the railway line, was exploded by a remote control device, overturning the engine and a passenger wagon,” the TCDD said in a statement. Earlier reports had five people killed when two passenger and one freight wagon were derailed.
A railway official, who had earlier said there had been another bomb attack on a second train “in the region” said there had been no internal confirmation of the second attack and the “information was probably unfounded”.
Bingol Deputy Governor Fikret Zaman was also quoted by Anatolia news agency as saying there had been a second bomb attack on another train. Turkish President Ahmet Necdet sent his condolences to victims of what he described as a terrorist attack, according to Anatolia news agency.
The attacks were blamed on the rebel Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), active in the region and which has often used radio controlled mines in attacks on military targets, a local security official, who wished to remain anonymous, told AFP.
In a separate incident, three Turkish police officers were injured after a bomb blast on Friday night in an outer suburb of Diyarbakir in the Kurd-dominated southeast of the country, a local official said. The remote-controlled bomb was set off as a police patrol approached a suspect package, he said. Violence in the mainly Kurdish southeast has increased sharply over the past few months after the PKK called off a five-year unilateral truce in June 2004 on grounds that reforms undertaken by Ankara to expand Kurdish freedoms were insufficient.
