By Xinhua
Ankara : A suspect of last Thursday’s deadly bomb attack that took place in the southeastern province of Diyarbakir was captured on Tuesday, the semi-official Anatolia news agency reported.
The suspect had received training in camps of the outlawed Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) in the north of Iraq for a long time, Turkish officials were quoted as saying.
Turkish media had reported that Diyarbakir prosecutors released four suspects on Sunday who had been held in suspicious connection with the deadly car bomb attack in the city of Diyarbakir on Jan.3.
The decision to release them was made due to a lack of evidence, said the reports, adding that the four men were arrested on Friday, one day after the attack that killed six people and wounded 67 others.
The PKK, which has waged a bloody 23-year campaign for Kurdish self-rule in southeastern Turkey, threatened to retaliate against Turkish air strikes on its bases in northern Iraq last month.
The Turkish military has confirmed three air strikes against PKK targets in northern Iraq since Dec. 16, which were conducted with U.S. intelligence assistance. It claimed that at least 150 PKK members were killed and more than 200 PKK positions were destroyed.
The Turkish military has massed up to 100,000 troops near the mountainous Iraqi border and has recently launched several cross-border attacks to battle separatist PKK rebels, who use northern Iraq as a launch pad for attacks against Turkey.
The PKK, listed by the United States and Turkey as a terrorist group, took up arms against Turkey in 1984 with the aim of creating an ethnic homeland in the southeast. More than 30,000people have been killed in the over-two-decade conflict.