Female militants shot dead after Istanbul attack

Turkish police shot dead two female militants after they fired shots and threw a grenade at a Turkish police bus in Istanbul.

A radical leftist group claimed responsibility for the attack, in which two police officers were lightly wounded, Governor Vasip Sahin said in televised comments.

One woman threw a grenade and the other opened fire with what appeared to be a machine gun as the riot police bus headed for the entrance of a police station in the Bayrampasa district of Turkey’s biggest city, footage from Dogan News Agency showed.

The hand grenade did not detonate.

Police fired back, injuring one of the women, before tracking them to a nearby building, CNN Turk said.

Special forces units and police surrounded the building, television footage showed, leading to an hour-long stand-off in which there was sporadic gunfire and the women were shot dead.

Istanbul Governor Vasip Sahin said both of the assailants were killed in the operation. He said two police officers were wounded — one by broken glass during the attack on the bus and the other during the assault on the building.

A claim of responsibility came from a website close to the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C), a group that has repeatedly targeted police stations, largely in Istanbul suburbs.

Attacks on Turkey’s security forces have also increased as violence has resurged in the predominantly Kurdish southeast, where a ceasefire between Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militants and the state collapsed last July.

The PKK, considered a terrorist group by Turkey, the US and the EU, launched a separatist armed rebellion against Turkey in 1984. More than 40,000 people, mostly Kurds, have since been killed.

Turkey has also become a target for Islamic State militants, who are blamed for three suicide bombings Those attacks killed more than 140 people.

Last month, a suicide car bombing that targeted buses carrying military personnel in the capital, Ankara, killed 29 people.

A Kurdish militant group that is an off-shoot of the PKK claimed responsibility for that attack. But the government maintains that it was the work of a Syrian Kurdish militia group, in coordination with the PKK.