Suicide Bombing Kills 2 at Istanbul Police Station

At least two people were killed and seven wounded in a suicide bombing Wednesday at an Istanbul police station, the latest in a wave of terrorist attacks in Turkey’s largest city.

The explosives-laden assailant, identified as Guntekin Koc, died along with a police officer who tried to stop him as he headed for the office of the police chief in the city’s commercial Sisli district, investigators said.

Koc, 22, was reportedly a member of a leftist terrorist group known as the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front, which has vowed to avenge the deaths of fellow militants in bloody prison raids last month. The urban guerrilla group has also targeted Western businesspeople and diplomats as part of its campaign to overthrow Turkey’s government.

Last month, two police officers were killed when left-wing militants opened fire on their van. And at least 10 people were injured in a New Year’s Eve blast in Istanbul’s main square.

Turkish special forces last month stormed 20 prisons in a bid to end a hunger strike by more than 1,100 leftist inmates protesting government plans to transfer them from teeming wards to new maximum-security prisons with cells holding no more than three people each.

Prisoners insist that they will be more vulnerable to abuse from prison officials in such cells. But officials say the new facilities are designed to break the hold of criminal gangs and militant groups over dormitories that in some cases have remained off limits to prison officials for nearly a decade.

About 30 prisoners died in the operation, called “Return to Life.” Turkish officials say most of them died after setting themselves on fire. But rights groups here say they have evidence showing that some victims were battered to death by Turkish forces, and they are demanding an investigation into the raids.

More than 1,000 inmates have been moved to the maximum-security prisons, where they are keeping up their 2 1/2-month-long hunger strike together with scores of other leftist inmates remaining in the older prisons. Nearly 400 other prisoners on a hunger strike are said to be in critical condition.

Mehmet Bekaroglu, a lawmaker from the main opposition Islamist Virtue Party and a member of a parliamentary commission set up to investigate prison abuse, said, “This matter remains of utmost urgency and gravity, yet neither the authorities nor society appear to care.”