Turkish police name brother of Isis suspect as Ankara bomber

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/14/turkish-police-brother-isis-suspect-ankara-bomber

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Turkish police have named the brother of a suspected Islamic State suicide bomber as one of two men who carried out a suicide attack on a peace rally in Ankara on Saturday.

The bombings killed at least 97 people and wounded hundreds more, the deadliest terror attack on Turkish soil in recent history.

One of the two perpetrators was reported to be Yunus Emre Alagöz, the older brother of Sheikh Abdurrahman Alagöz, a suspected Isis member who in July killed 33 Kurdish and Turkish activists in a suicide bomb attack in Suruç, a town on the Turkish-Syrian border.

Police named the second Ankara suicide bomber as Ömer Deniz Dündar, according to the Turkish media.

Both suicide bombers were identified after analysis of DNA samples from the blast site in front of the central train station in Ankara, and were said to be part of an Isis cell from Adıyaman, a small city in the south-east of Turkey, where hundreds of young men, and sometimes women, are reported to have left to join Islamist militant groups in Syria.

Related: 'Isis suicide bomber' strikes Turkish border town as Syrian war spills over

According to local media reports, both attackers were on a list of 21 potential suicide bombers compiled by the Turkish National Intelligence Organisation (MIT) and widely circulated on social media in Turkey before the official disclosure of their identities. The two bombers were said to have travelled to Ankara in separate vehicles from Gaziantep province on the border with Syria.

Turkish police were searching for Alagöz in the aftermath of the Suruç bombing, fearing that he might commit a similar attack.

Dündar was in his early 20s when he left Adıyaman in 2013 to join an Islamist unit then affiliated with al-Qaida. His father said that he had repeatedly asked the police and Turkish authorities to intervene, alerting them about jihadi recruitment activities in the city, but without success.

Increasingly desperate, Dündar’s father travelled to Syria himself to plead with an al-Qaida commander, a Turk, for the return of his son, but he was rebuffed there also.

A year later, Dündar returned to Turkey, and got married. His father went to the police, warning them that his son might be involved in illegal activities. Dündar was brought in for questioning, but released after one day at the police station. Eight months later, he departed for Syria again, from where he is thought to have returned with Alagöz to launch the attack in Ankara.

The Turkish government has faced severe criticism over its failure to identify and arrest possible Islamist attackers, and both Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, leader of the main opposition Republican People’s party (CHP) and Selahattin Demirtaş, co-chair of the leftist Peoples’ Democratic party (HDP), have said that the government was responsible for the Ankara attack.

On Wednesday, the acting Turkish prime minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu, said that the findings in the aftermath of the Ankara bombings indicated that both Islamic State militants and members of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK) were involved in the attack.

His remarks came after two suspected PKK members were detained for posting tweets hinting at a possible bombing in Ankara only hours before the explosions. He did not explain how Turkish investigators linked the two groups who are fighting each other in Iraq and Syria.