An ongoing investigation into last week's bomb attack by the terrorist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) on a police bus that killed 13 police officers has revealed that the assailants detonated five tons of explosives in the attack. The officers were targeted on Sept. 8 while escorting customs officials to the Dilucu border gate separating Turkey and the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic, which is sandwiched between Armenia and Iran and controlled by Azerbaijan. Police questioned two locals who are accused of having aided the terrorists for the attack on Monday. Salih Padir, who allegedly sold his pick-up van to the terrorists for the attack, and Yazlık village head Musa Padak, who helped the terrorists to find a van to be used in the attack, were arrested late on Monday. The private Dogan news agency reported that both men confessed to having helped the terrorists and explained how the attack was carried out in detail during their interrogation. According to their statements to the police, the terrorists loaded the van with five tons of explosives they had hidden in a hayloft in Bulakbaşı village and then left the vehicle by the road near Çamurlu village. They later detonated the vehicle when the policemen were driving past. The attack came after 16 soldiers were killed and six others wounded in a clash on Sept. 6 sparked by a PKK offensive in the Daglıca area of Hakkari province. The number of police and military casualties incurred from clashes with the PKK since the June 7 general election has exceeded 100. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced approximately a month after the election that a settlement process instigated to solve the decades-old Kurdish problem had ended and that the PKK had begun targeting security forces. The renewed conflict, occurring less than two months before an election the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) hopes will restore its majority, has shattered the process that Erdoğan launched in 2012 in an attempt to end the violence that had killed more than 40,000 people over three decades. It has also complicated Turkey's role in the US-led fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant ISIS. A Kurdish militia allied with the PKK has been battling ISIS in northern Syria, backed by US air strikes. But Turkey fears territorial gains by Syria's Kurds will fuel separatist sentiment among its own Kurdish population.
