A roadside bomb in central Istanbul wounded 16 people, almost all of them police officers, on Thursday, in an attack near Turkey’s ruling party headquarters, officials said. The remote-controlled explosive was fitted to a stationary motorcycle and went off in the morning as a police bus carrying 21 officers passed by, authorities said. The blast hit close to the offices of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who condemned the attack as an “act of terror”. “The villains that carried out this attack will never reach their ambitions,” he said in televised remarks, without naming any suspects. Several outlawed armed groups — Kurdish, Islamist and leftist extremist — have carried out bomb attacks in Istanbul in the past. Erdogan said 15 of those wounded were police officers. Istanbul police chief Huseyin Capkin said the blast came from a “remote-controlled bomb that went off as a duty vehicle with 21 policemen on board drove by,” the Anatolia news agency reported. The device was made of plastic explosives, Istanbul governor Huseyin Avni Mutlu was quoted as saying by the agency.
