Bomb Blasts at Kurdish Paper Kill 1, Hurt 22
Three coordinated explosions ripped through separate offices of Turkey’s leading pro-Kurdish daily early Saturday, killing one person and injuring at least 22.
The biggest blast occurred at Ozgur Ulke’s main offices in Istanbul’s Kumkapi district, gutting the four-story building and leaving it a smoldering mess of twisted metal and collapsed concrete. All the casualties occurred there.
Other explosions destroyed the paper’s Ankara office and damaged a separate Istanbul bureau.
Police said two of the injured were firefighters who struggled for hours to put out the fires from the explosion, which sent bricks and metal flying and blew out windows in nearby buildings.
But Ozgur Ulke journalists blamed the government, saying it was out to silence them because of their coverage of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) insurgency in the southeast. More than 13,000 people have died in 10 years.
Scores of Ozgur Ulke (Free Country) employees have been jailed for supporting the Kurdish rebels, and 10 reporters have been killed. Human rights groups accuse the security forces of involvement in their murders; the government denies the accusations.
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