ANKARA, OCT 24 – Five people were killed and 22 others injured in an attack on a Turkiye defense firm near Ankara that the government said was most likely carried out by Kurdish fighters.
“The manner in which this action was carried out is most likely linked to the PKK,” said Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya, referring to the Kurdish militant group that has waged a decades-long insurgency against the Turkish state.
He said efforts to identify the perpetrators are still ongoing.
Shortly after 3:30 p.m., a large explosion rocked the headquarters of the Turkiye Aerospace Industry (TAI) located about 40 kilometers north of Ankara.
The blast sent a plume of smoke into the air while gunfire rang out, Turkiye media reported in an incident Yerlikaya denounced as a terrorist attack.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is in Russia for talks with Vladimir Putin, condemned it as a brutal attack on the Turkiye defense industry “targeting the survival of our country,” he said in X.
Yerlikaya earlier said three of the injured were in critical condition and that two attackers, “a woman and a man”, had been “neutralized” without saying whether there were other attackers still at large.
There was no immediate claim for the attack but Defense Minister Yasar Guler also pointed the finger at PKK criminals.
“As they always do, they try to disrupt the peace of our country through despicable and dishonorable attacks, we will make them suffer for what they did,” he said.
Turkiye vice president Cevdet Yilmaz said four of the victims were TAI employees while the fifth was a taxi driver. Earlier media reports said the attackers killed him and took his taxi to carry out the attack. – AFP