Two more massive bombs exploded in Istanbul last Thursday, leaving the entire city looking apprehensively over its shoulder for the next attack, Gareth Jenkins writes from Istanbul The two massive car bombs were detonated nearly simultaneously at the British Consulate General and the Turkish headquarters of the London-based HSBC bank. The blasts killed 30 and wounded over 450, exposing as suspect the boasts of the Turkish authorities that, just five days after attacks on two Istanbul synagogues killed 25 people and injured 303, it was once again safe to walk the city's streets. The first of Thursday's attacks occurred a few minutes before 11am when the driver of a pickup truck suddenly veered off the highway running past the HSBC skyscraper in the business district of Levent, drove up to the entrance and detonated a huge bomb. The blast ripped off the front of the building and scattered widely a deadly hail of concrete, glass and fragments of cars. Miraculously, only three people inside the building were killed, but another eight lost their lives in the street below, their bodies torn apart by flying debris. A little over three minutes later another pickup truck suddenly accelerated towards the gates of the British Consulate General in the old Ottoman quarter of Beyoglu, close to the scene of one of the synagogue attacks five days earlier. An even larger explosion blew the 1.5 tonne steel gate off its hinges, demolishing the gatehouse and the offices just inside the compound wall and sending a second plume of acrid yellow smoke into the sky above the city. The explosion was heard across almost all of Istanbul and even rattled windows 15 kilometres away on the Asian side of the city. Ten people were killed inside the compound, including the Consul-General Roger Short, who was just months away from retirement and had recently been looking at apartments in Beyoglu with a view to settling permanently in the city. Two other Britons were among the dead, together with seven Turkish staffers, most of them security guards, cleaners and gardeners who had been working in the bright autumn sunshine. Another eight people were killed in the street outside and hundreds more injured, mostly by flying glass, as the force of the explosion blew out windows over an area of 300 metres. As with the synagogue bombings, members of the Turkish government immediately tried to make political capital out of blasts. Interior Minister Abdulkadir Aksu went on national television to claim that Turkey had for years been single-handedly combating terrorism in the form of Kurdish separatism. The minister clearly was looking for international validation of that controversial struggle against so-called terrorism that began and ended before the 11 September attacks that inaugurated the current "war on terrorism". "Perhaps now they understand why we always argued that terrorism was an international problem and that one day it would come back to hit them," he said. Earlier in the week Justice Minister Cemil Cicek had boasted of the efficiency of the Turkish police in identifying the drivers of the pickup trucks used in the synagogue bombings. While Istanbul Police Chief Celalettin Cerrah proudly announced that this meant that Turkish authorities had "solved" the attacks. When last Thursday's bombings demonstrated that this was simply not true, Cerrah turned on the Turkish media, which had published the identities of the synagogue bombers, claiming that, by doing so, they had compromised the police investigation. "It is the media which has really killed those who died in Levent and Beyoglu," he announced. But it was the police who briefed the press on the identity of the synagogue bombers in an attempt to prove their own efficiency. In any case, last Thursday's attacks were clearly the result of weeks, perhaps months, of planning; not something which could have been thrown together in days or hours. Such cheap attempts by the Turkish authorities to exploit the suffering of those who lost friends and relatives have delivered another blow to already low public morale. Also contributing to flagging morale is the initial indication that the drivers of the pickup trucks were Turkish. Even if, as Al-Qa'eda has apparently claimed, it masterminded the simultaneous attacks, there is little doubt that it received considerable assistance from local sympathisers. In September 2001, after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, my daughter, who was then eight years old, asked me: "What will happen if the bad men who did this come here to Turkey?" Now, as the traumatised inhabitants of Istanbul look anxiously over their shoulders, unsure when or where the next blast may occur, their fears have been compounded by an alarming realisation: the "bad men" did not come from somewhere else, but were here all along.
