At least six people were killed and dozens injured in an explosion on Istanbul’s popular pedestrian thoroughfare Istiklal avenue, the city’s governor has tweeted.
The cause of the blast was not immediately clear.
This is the first such explosion in Turkey’s largest city in several years. Turkey was hit by a string of deadly bombings between 2015 and 2017 by ISIL (ISIS) and outlawed Kurdish groups.
Here’s a timeline of blasts in Turkey:
July 2015: At least 30 people were killed and nearly 100 wounded after an explosion in the southeastern Turkish town of Suruc, on the border with Syria.
August 2015: A bomb attack at a police station in Istanbul injured five police officers and two civilians.
October 2015: Two explosions at a road junction in the centre of the Turkish capital Ankara killed at least 95 people and injured nearly 200 others.
February 2016: At least 28 people were killed and 60 others wounded in a car bomb in Ankara.
March 2016: At least 37 people were killed and more than 70 hospitalised with wounds after a car bomb struck Ankara.
March 2016: At least five were killed and 36 wounded after an explosion believed to have been caused by a suicide bomber hit the popular Istiklal street in central Istanbul’s Taksim Square area.
June 2016: At least 41 people were killed and nearly 239 others wounded in an attack at Istanbul’s main Ataturk international airport.
August 2016: More than 50 people were killed and dozens more wounded in a suicide attack at a wedding ceremony in Turkey’s southeastern province of Gaziantep, near the Syria border.
October 2016: A car bomb attack on a military station killed at least 18 people in the Hakkari province of southeast Turkey.
November 2016: ISIL claimed responsibility for a car bombing that killed nine people in Kurdish-dominated southeastern Turkey.
December 2016: Two explosions hit the Turkish city of Istanbul, killing at least 38 people, mostly police personnel, and wounding more than 160 others.
January 2017: At least 39 people were killed and dozens more wounded in an attack on a crowded nightclub in Istanbul.
January 2017: An explosion outside a court in the Turkish Aegean city of Izmir killed at least two people, including a police officer, and wounded several others, according to a statement by the governor of the city.
July 2019: At least three people were killed in a car bomb blast in the southern Turkish town of Reyhanli, located close to the Syrian border.
September 2019: Seven people were killed and 10 others wounded in southeast Turkey’s Diyarbakir province when an improvised explosive device (IED) placed on a road went off as a vehicle carrying villagers passed by.
November 2022: At least six people were killed and a dozen others wounded on Sunday, November 13 when an explosion rocked a busy pedestrian street in central Istanbul, according to the local governor and published videos.
