The Kurdistan Freedom Hawks (TAK), an offshoot of the terrorist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), has claimed responsibility for a deadly car bomb attack in the southeastern province of Diyarbakır that claimed the lives of 11 people on Friday.
There has been confusion since Friday over the terrorist group behind the attack. The Diyarbakır Governor’s Office announced on Friday that the PKK claimed responsibility for the attack. However, Reuters reported late on Friday that the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) was the perpetrator of the Diyarbakır attack, according to an announcement from the group’s Amaq news agency.
A second official statement from the Diyarbakır Governor’s Office on Saturday said it was the PKK that perpetrated the attack, based on intercepted radio communication of the PKK terrorists.
On Sunday, an announcement was made by TAK that was posted by the Kurdish ANF news agency in which it claimed responsibility for the Diyarbakır attack, perpetrated in the aftermath of an operation launched against the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) in the early hours of Friday, which led to the detentions of more than 10 HDP deputies including the party’s co-chairs.
TAK said it carried out the attack in protest of the “merciless” pressure and attacks on democratic, leftist and socialist circles in Turkey.
A car bomb went off at about 8 a.m. local time near a police station in Diyarbakır’s Bağlar district on Friday, killing 11 people and injuring scores of people. Two of the victims were police officers.