Kurdish Group Claims Role in String of Blasts

As a Kurdish rebel group took responsibility for a string of weekend bombings, a new blast Monday killed three people and injured dozens in the southern Mediterranean resort of Antalya.

The explosion shook the main shopping area of a city especially popular with Russian and Israeli tourists, and Russia’s vice consul, Sergey Koritsky, told the Reuters news agency that a Russian and an Israeli were among the injured.

Earlier Monday, three bombs detonated in Marmaris, another tourist destination on the Aegean coast. At least 20 people, including 10 Britons, were injured when one of the devices tore through the shuttle bus they were traveling in.

Six Turks were hurt when a package bomb exploded outside a government building in the country’s commercial capital, Istanbul, late Sunday.

A Kurdish rebel faction known as the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons claimed responsibility for the Marmaris and Istanbul attacks.

“We had warned the Turkish public and the world public [that] Turkey is not a safe place, that no one should go to tourist areas,” the group said on its website. “Hardly a single tourist resort has remained untouched by our bombs; nothing will be the same in Turkey again.”

The Turkish media sought to downplay the attacks, and the country’s leaders issued no immediate comment. The few television images showed shattered windows of shops whose charred contents littered the pavement. Bystanders looked on as rescue workers ferried the wounded to hospitals. Many of the victims appeared to be in a state of shock, their faces blackened by smoke.

Formed in 2004, the Freedom Falcons are widely thought to be the urban guerrilla arm of the outlawed separatist Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, that has fought Turkish security forces since 1984.

Unlike the PKK, the Falcons have concentrated on civilian targets, and claimed responsibility for an explosion last year that killed a British woman, an Irish teenager and three others in Kusadasi, a tourist destination on the Aegean.

“Their aim is to torpedo tourism and other strategic sectors, to force the government to negotiate with them,” said Hasim Hasimi, a moderate Kurdish politician. “Instead, the government is growing even tougher and the PKK is losing support, even among the Kurds.”

Some terrorism experts speculated that the Marmaris attacks might have been provoked by recent action by Britain’s Parliament to ban the activities of the PKK and the Falcons on British soil.

The legislation also renders membership in either group a criminal offense.

“It is likely that Britons were deliberately attacked and that resorts most frequented by Britons were selected,” said Nihat Ali Ozcan, a counter-terrorism expert with the TEPAV think tank in Ankara. “The message to Britons is ‘Beware.’ ”

A British Embassy spokeswoman in Ankara described such talk as “purely speculative.”

“We have no evidence to corroborate such claims,” she said.

At the same time, the British Foreign Office warned that “international terrorist groups as well as indigenous ones are currently active in Turkey.”

Turkish officials had hoped the tourism sector would generate $20 billion in revenue this year. But the PKK attacks and last winter’s deadly outbreak of bird flu have kept many vacationers away.

Until PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan’s capture in 1999, the group had waged a conventional guerrilla war for independence in the country’s heavily Kurdish southeast.

Nearly 40,000 people, most of them Kurds, died in the conflict. The brutal tactics of the Turkish army drew international sympathy to the rebels’ cause and a steady stream of recruits to the guerrillas.

Hopes for a peaceful settlement grew when Ocalan renounced demands for independence shortly after his arrest, saying the country’s estimated 14 million Kurds would settle for cultural autonomy instead. He ordered his men to end their fight and to withdraw to Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq.

Under the cease-fire, Turkey introduced reforms that gave the Kurds the right to publish and broadcast in their long-banned language and, for the first time, teach it in private schools. The measures helped persuade the European Union to open long-delayed membership negotiations with Turkey last year.

The rebels called off the truce in June 2004, citing Turkey’s refusal to negotiate with them. The entire country, they warned, had become a battlefield.

Despite its overtures to the Kurds, Turkey’s government says it will never talk to “terrorists.”

The country’s hawkish new chief of general staff, Yasar Buyukanit, vowed during his inauguration Monday to keep up the military battle against the PKK, which is listed as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department and the EU.

After months of sometimes angry complaints by the Turkish government that the U.S. was not doing enough to stem Kurdish separatists based in northern Iraq, the Bush administration Monday appointed a prominent retired Air Force general as special envoy to deal with the issue.

Gen. Joseph W. Ralston, a former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the supreme commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization until 2003, will work with the Turkish and Iraqi governments to “eliminate the terrorist threat” posed by the PKK. Ralston’s appointment comes after warnings last month by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan that he was considering a cross-border military incursion to clear PKK bases in northern Iraq.

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Times staff writer Peter Spiegel in Washington contributed to this report.