Australian tourist dies after suicide attack

An Australian woman has died of her injuries after a suicide bomb attack in a busy Istanbul square, officials said today, raising the death toll to four.

The banned Marxist group, Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front, or DHKP-C, claimed responsibility for the attack on Monday which also killed the bomber, two policemen and injured 20 others.

Amanda Rigg, 23, from New South Wales, Australia, was on a life-support machine at an Istanbul hospital after the explosion tore off her arm, chin and injured her lungs. She died late on Wednesday, a hospital official said.

DHKP-C said it carried out the attack in support of some 200 left-wing prisoners and their relatives who are on a hunger strike in protest at Turkey’s new maximum security prisons.

Thirty-three people, most of them DHKP-C militants, have died in the hunger strike so far.

The Government issued a ‘‘final warning’’ to the group on Tuesday, signalling a possible crackdown on militants and an intervention to stop the hunger strikes.

Newspapers said today the bomber was carrying 3.3 pounds of dynamite when he set off the explosives near a police post, where officers who patrol Istanbul’s Taksim square gather.