Turkish police shot dead a woman carrying guns and hand grenades and detained a man as they tried to attack Istanbul’s police headquarters yesterday, officials and media said, the third attack on an official building in the past two days.
A photograph published by local media showed a red-haired woman lying on the ground with a rifle strapped to her and a handgun by her side. Television footage showed police vehicles sealing off the street in the central Aksaray neighbourhood.
“The Istanbul police headquarters on Vatan street was targeted by rifle fire and a female terrorist was killed in the clash,” the Istanbul governor’s office said in a statement.
The woman was carrying a rifle, two hand grenades and one pistol, it said. Local media said a man had also been detained.
The attack comes a day after two leftist militants took an Istanbul prosecutor hostage in his office. All three died late on Tuesday after police special forces stormed the courthouse in an effort to release him. Separately, police detained a gunman yesterday who entered an Istanbul branch of the ruling AK Party and hung from its window a Turkish flag with the emblem of a sword added.
It was not immediately clear whether any of the attacks were linked, but Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu warned of the risk of “provocations” and attempts to cause chaos ahead of June’s national election.
“We are aware that we face an axis of evil and there is an attempt to instigate an atmosphere of chaos ahead of the election,” he told reporters, hours before the attack on the Istanbul police headquarters, without identifying who constituted the axis members.
Justice Minister Kenan Ipek said the two members of the extreme leftist Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C) who took prosecutor Mehmet Selim Kiraz, 46, hostage on Tuesday had “held a gun to the nation”.
“We don’t see this as an attack on our deceased prosecutor, but on the whole justice system,” he said at a ceremony for Kiraz attended by hundreds of lawyers and judges.
“Our state is powerful enough to track down those behind these lowlifes ... The fact these assassins are dead shouldn’t put those nefarious and dark forces at ease,” he said, as Kiraz’s coffin was displayed in the courthouse foyer.
Kiraz had been leading an investigation into the death last March of Berkin Elvan, 15, who died nine months after falling into a coma after being hit by a police teargas canister during anti-government protests in 2013.
The DHKP-C said on its website that the hostage-taking was in revenge for Elvan, whose death a year ago prompted renewed protests in parts of Istanbul.