Forty-one people were killed and 239 others were wounded in a suicide bomb attack at Istanbul’s main international airport on Tuesday, the Istanbul governor’s office said in a statement, making it the deadliest attack this year in Turkey.
Ten of those killed in the attack, blamed on Islamic State, were foreign nationals while three people held dual nationality. Among the wounded, 109 were discharged from the hospitals, the governor’s office said in its statement on Wednesday.
One attacker opened fire in the departures hall with an automatic rifle, sending passengers diving for cover and trying to flee, before all three blew themselves up in or around the arrivals hall a floor below, witnesses and officials said.
The attack on Europe’s third-busiest airport was one of the deadliest in a series of suicide bombings in Turkey, which is part of the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State and is struggling to contain the spillover from neighbouring Syria’s civil war. It is also battling an insurgency by Kurdish militants in its largely Kurdish south-east.
Police fired shots to try to stop two of the attackers just before they reached a security checkpoint at the arrivals hall, but they detonated their explosives, a Turkish official said.
Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said: “This attack, targeting innocent people is a vile, planned terrorist act.”
“There is initial evidence that each of the three suicide bombers blew themselves up after opening fire,” he told reporters at the airport. Yildirim said the attackers had come to the airport by taxi and that preliminary findings pointed to Islamic State responsibility.
Two U.S. counterterrorism officials familiar with the early stages of investigations said Islamic State was at the top of the list of suspects even though there was no evidence yet.
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the use of suicide bombers against “soft” targets was more typical of Islamic State than the other obvious suspect, Kurdish PKK militants, who generally attack official government targets.
One of the officials also said that, while Islamic State had recently stepped up attacks in Turkey, the group rarely claims responsibility because Turkey remains one of the main corridors for its fighters travelling from Europe to Syria and Iraq.
No group had claimed responsibility more than nine hours after the attack, which started around 9:50 p.m. local time (1850 GMT).
The attack bore similarities to a suicide bombing by Islamic State militants at Brussels airport in March that killed 16 people. A coordinated attack also targeted a rush-hour metro train, killing a further 16 people in the Belgian capital.
-“THE ROOF CAME DOWN”-
Most those killed were Turkish nationals but foreigners were also among the dead, a Turkish official said.
Ali Tekin, who was at the arrivals hall waiting for a guest, said the roof came down after an “extremely loud” explosion. “Inside the airport it is terrible, you can’t recognise it, the damage is big,” Tekin said.
A woman named Duygu, who was at passport control after arriving from Germany, said she threw herself to the floor after the explosion. “Everyone started running away. Everywhere was covered with blood and body parts. I saw bullet holes on the doors,” she said.
Paul Roos, 77, said he saw one of the attackers “randomly shooting” in the departures hall from about 50 meters (55 yards) away. “He was wearing all black. His face was not masked,” said Roos, a South African on his way home after a holiday in southern Turkey.
This is the latest in a string of attacks that have struck Turkey in recent months. Istanbul’s Ataturk International Airport is one of the busiest airports in the world.
Authorities halted the takeoff of scheduled flights from the airport and passengers were transferred to hotels, a Turkish Airlines official said.
Earlier an airport official said some flights to the airport had been diverted.
This is a developing story and will be updated as details come.