Same man ‘planted’ bombs at offices of Turkey's HDP

İsmail Saymaz

The HDP's office in Adana in the aftermath of the May 18 explosion. AA photo

The same man “planted” bombs at the offices of the Kurdish problem-focused Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) in southern Turkey to explode on May 18, according to officials and eyewitnesses who spoke to Hürriyet on May 19.

The bombs, which were initially reported as hidden in a cargo parcel and a gift-packaged flower pot, exploded in the HDP’s Adana and Mersin offices on May 18, injuring three people as party co-chair Selahattin Demirtaş toured the region.

According to eyewitnesses who spoke to Hürriyet, a black-haired, fair-skinned, 30- to 35-year-old man, around 170-175 cm in height and wearing a light-colored short-sleeve shirt, came to the HDP’s Adana office on May 17 and left the flower pot, saying it was a gift to the local HDP head from the shopkeepers of the Spice Bazaar.

After scanning security camera footage, Turkish police tracked the man and concluded that he had also delivered a bomb hidden in another flower pot to the HDP’s Mersin office on the same day. 

“It has been determined that the same person or people were behind the Adana and Mersin incidents. It is important to find not only the person who planted the bombs, but also his contacts,” lawyer Vedat Özkan, who was also nominated by the HDP for parliament from Adana, told Hürriyet.

Investigation’s new findings

More casualties were possibly avoided, as party officials in Mersin had suspected that the pot could have a hidden wiretapping device before deciding to remove it from the room and put it on the terrace. In Adana, on the other hand, the bomb exploded in the filing cabinet of the party’s provincial head, injuring him and two others.

HDP Mersin Provincial Chair Selman Günbat said the hidden explosive was a “time bomb with fragmentation ammunition.”

“We have some information at hand, but we cannot reveal it now,” Mersin Governor Özdemir Çakacak said on May 19, adding that efforts to detain the suspects were continuing.

Adana Governor Mustafa Büyük, on the other hand, said “serious distance has been covered in the investigation and the case already has been partly solved.”

MİT warns about Syrian regime

Sources say that security forces are seeking to detain three people in connection with the delivery of the flower pots. Special teams formed by anti-terror and intelligence services continued to work in Adana and Mersin on May 19 to find the culprits, who are thought to have conspired to “create chaos before general elections with coordinated bombings on a target that they picked consciously.”

The National Intelligence Agency (MİT) warned security forces more than a month ago that the Syrian regime recently sent agents to Turkey to “create chaos with attacks in Mersin, Adana, Hatay, Şanlıurfa and Gaziantep.”