Authorities are investigating whether bomb caused overnight blast Sabiha Gökçen airport, which killed cleaner and damaged five planes

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

An explosion at an airport in Istanbul killed one person and damaged five planes hundreds of metres apart on Wednesday, Turkish media said, triggering a security alert as authorities sought to determine if a bomb was responsible.

The authorities said it was too early confirm if the airport had been targeted in an attack, but the transport minister said there had been no security lapses. Five planes suffered slight damage as a result of fragments from the explosion, the minister said.

Turkey is on high alert after 103 people were killed on October 10 when two suicide bombers ripped through a crowd of peace activists in the capital Ankara, the worst attack in its modern history.

That attack was blamed on Islamic State (IS) jihadists, like two other deadly strikes in the country’s Kurdish-dominated southeast earlier in the year.

The blast at Sabiha Gökçen, the city’s second airport and located on its Asian side, occurred shortly after 2am, local budget carrier Pegasus said, fatally wounding a cleaner on one of its planes.

Zehra Yamac, 30, was taken to hospital but died of head wounds hours after the blast. The wounded victim, also a cleaner, was hurt in the leg.

Police armed with rifles and protective vests imposed tight security at entrances to the airport, searching vehicles while a police helicopter circled overhead, the state-run Anadolu agency said.

Security was also stepped up at Istanbul’s largest airport, Ataturk, on the European side of the city, with police checking vehicles entering the complex, Turkish television said.

No passengers were in the area at the time of the airport blast.

A photo on Dogan’s website showed a hole in one plane window. Video footage showed investigators taking photos of a terminal building wall, dozens of metres from the nearest planes.

Transport Minister Binali Yildirim said five planes were damaged and were now being repaired in the airport’s hanger. But he declined to give details on the possible cause. “At this moment it’s too early to give a verdict but I want to emphasise there is no weakness concerning security,” Yildirim told Anatolia.

Neither President Recep Tayyip Erdogan nor Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu referred to the incident in speeches on Wednesday.

The airport said on its official Twitter account that “flights from our terminals are continuing according to schedule.”

Sabiha Gokcen airport, named after Turkey’s first female fighter pilot, is the second international airport in Istanbul after much larger Ataturk airport.

Sabiha Gokcen hosts flights both to domestic and numerous international destinations often with budget airlines but also national flag carrier Turkish Airlines.

In 2015, up to November, it hosted over 17 million domestic passengers and almost nine million international passengers, according to company figures.

It is now fully owned by Malaysian Airports Holding which completed the acquisition of the remaining shares in the airport this year.

“We are working very closely with the Turkish government and our counterparts to facilitate the investigation, and we await their official report on it,” Dato’ Azmi Murad, the executive director of Sabiha Gokcen said in a statement.

“The Turkish government has heightened security within the vicinity of the airport, which includes helicopter surveillance,” he added.

According to Azmi, the airport resumed “normal flight operations” around two hours after the blast.

Bomb attacks by Kurdish, leftist and Islamist militants are common in Turkey. A three-decades-old conflict between the state and the militant Kurdistan Workers’ party has flared up in the country’s mainly Kurdish south-east since the collapse of a ceasefire in July.

Turkish authorities have in recent weeks detained several suspected IS members with officials saying they were planning attacks in Istanbul.



But Turkey is also waging an all-out assault on the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) which has staged dozens of deadly attacks against members of the security forces in the southeast of the country.

Meanwhile the banned ultra-left Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C) has also staged a string of usually small-scale attacks in Istanbul over the last months.

According to its website, Sabiha Gökçen served around 26 million passengers in the first 11 months of the year, less than half the number at the main Ataturk airport on the European side of the city.



