TURKEY: A bomb blast killed three Turks and injured dozens more people, including foreign tourists, in Turkey's southwestern resort town of Antalya yesterday, the fifth such terror attack in less than 24 hours.
On Sunday, one bomb exploded in Istanbul injuring six people, while three in Marmaris, another resort town in the country's southwest, injured 21 people, including Britons and Turks. The Kurdistan Freedom Falcons, seen as a front for the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), claimed responsibility for Sunday's attacks.
It warned that "Turkey is not a safe country, tourists should not come to Turkey". There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the Antalya attack.
Since 1984 the PKK has waged a campaign of violence aimed at establishing a separate Kurdish state in the country's predominantly Kurdish southeast.
It declared a ceasefire in 1999 following the arrest and trial of its leader Abdullah Ocalan, now in jail in western Turkey.
But since 2004, even as a new government loosened political restrictions on Kurds, attacks have resumed against the military in the southeast and civilians in the west.
Since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Turkish officials have warned that the PKK, which has camps in the Kurdish-dominated north of Iraq, have been able to obtain more sophisticated weapons and explosives.
A spokesman for the Turkish government said Ankara was in constant dialogue with the Iraqi authorities, US forces in Iraq and other countries' intelligence services. "But we are just not getting the concrete results that we need," he said.
The bombings appeared to confirm fears that the PKK would increasingly target tourist resorts, in an attempt to damage the economy.
One of the bombs in Marmaris had been left in a bag under the seat of a minibus travelling a route popular with tourists, while the other two had been left in litter bins in the town centre which was crowded with holidaymakers on their way to restaurants and bars. Last year foreign tourists contributed €11.5 billion to the economy, up from €9.5 billion in 2004.
Tourist numbers for the first seven months of this year were down 6.4 per cent to 10.99 million. The industry, however, is reluctant to attribute the drop in arrivals to terror incidents alone.