Terrorists suspected in explosions at tourist hotels, gas plant in Turkey

ISTANBUL, Turkey – Explosions rocked two small tourist hotels and a gas plant in Istanbul early Tuesday in apparent terrorist strikes, killing at least two people and injuring seven others, police said.

The blasts came amid heightened security concerns in Turkey, the focus of earlier terror attacks including four suicide truck bombings in November blamed on al Qaeda that killed more than 60 people in Istanbul.

Assailants entered the liquefied petroleum gas plant, where cooking gas canisters are filled, after cutting the barbed wire, said Tayfun Demiroren, an official at the plant.

Two bombs were placed under storage tanks, Demiroren said. The explosions took place a half hour apart and shortly after an anonymous bomb threat, police said. There were no casualties at the plant, located outside Baghdad.

A gas leak at the plant was under control, Demiroren said.

Two earlier explosions rocked inexpensive hotels at around 2 a.m. local time, police said.

Workers at one of the Pars hotel in the Laleli district, home to inexpensive hotels and clothing stores catering to Eastern European tourists, said they received an anonymous call warning of a bomb in a room 10 minutes before the explosion, the Anatolia news agency reported.

At the second target, the Star Holiday Hotel in the Sultanahmet area glass and chunks of concrete littered the streets behind the hotel.

“It appears to be a terrorist attack,” Police Chief Celalettin Cerrah told the Anatolia news agency.

Police said that two people were killed at the Pars hotel, while seven people were injured at both hotels. Among the injured were two Dutch tourists, a tourist from Ukraine, two Chinese tourists and a Turkish citizen, police said.

“There was a huge explosion and the glass started shattering,” said Umut Akgul, who was visiting a friend who works at the Holiday Hotel at the time of the blast. Akgul said he ran to the back of the hotel and started to help evacuate tourists after the explosion, which ripped off the exterior walls of the top two floors of the hotel.

There were 37 guests at the Pars hotel and 20 in the Holiday hotel at the time of the blasts, officials said.

The blasts happened a few miles from the hotel where the U.S. Olympic men’s basketball team is staying during the final stop of its pre-Olympic tour. The team toured Topkapi Palace on Monday, guarded by a large contingent of police. They were scheduled to play Turkey in an exhibition game Tuesday night.

In 1996, an underground Islamic group, Islamic Jihad, claimed responsibility for an arson attack on a hotel in Laleli that killed 17 Ukrainian tourists. The group said at the time it had attacked the hotel to punish two Ukrainian women who reportedly were giving information to Russian authorities about Turkish Islamic fighters volunteering to fight alongside Chechen rebels.