ISTANBUL: Turkish police arrested around 50 foreign nationals in Istanbul early Sunday in a sweep targeting ISIS extremists suspected of involvement in last weekend’s Ankara suicide bombings, reports said.
The raid focused on several apartments in the Pendik suburb on Istanbul’s Asian side. It did not indicate the nationalities of those detained and questioned by police. The Dogan news agency said the suspects were preparing to travel to Iraq and Syria to join ISIS.
Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has said ISIS is the chief suspect in the double suicide bombing that killed 102 people at a peace rally in Ankara on Oct. 10 in the deadliest attack in the country’s modern history.
Turkish media reports have said one of the two bombers was identified as Yunus Emre Alagoz, brother of the man who carried out a similar attack in July in Suruc, a town in southern Turkey on the border with Syria, that killed 34 people.
The other, identified as Omer Deniz Dundar, had twice been to Syria in recent times, the reports said.
