Leftist group claims suicide attack in Turkish police station

An outlawed leftist group has claimed responsibility for the suicide attack on an Istanbul police station that killed a policeman.

The Revolutionary People's Liberation Party-Front or DHKP-C said one of its fighters had entered the police station in downtown Istanbul Wednesday with bombs strapped to his body and had "eliminated the enemy target".

Police identified the bomber as 23-year-old Gultekin Koc, who had been on the run for three years after being sentenced to a three-year prison term for membership in the group.

The assailant detonated the bombs in the police station's cafeteria, killing himself, and a policeman and injuring seven others.

The DHKP-C has vowed to avenge the deaths of its militants and sympathisers who died last month when soldiers stormed 20 prisons throughout Turkey. Thirty inmates died during the raids, many of them setting themselves on fire.

"Gultekin Koc became a hero by sacrificing himself to make them pay the price for the massacre of his prisoner comrades," the group said in a faxed statement.

Authorities raided the penitentiaries to end a hunger strike by hundreds of leftist inmates protesting government plans to transfer them from their dormitory-style wards to small cells where they fear abuse. Authorities said the wards were run like indoctrination centers.

The government transferred more than 1000 inmates after the raids to the one-or three-person cells, where close to 400 prisoners are still on a more than two-month long hunger strike.

The front said it would fight on.