Suicide Bomb Blast in Istanbul,Turkey Tuesday Jan 12,2016

 

A suicide bomber struck the heart of Istanbul’s central tourist district on Tuesday January 12,2016, killing at least 10 people and wounding 15 others in what Turkey’s president described as a reprisal for his country’s war against terror.

Turkish officials identified the attacker in Sultanahmet Square as a Syrian man in his late 20s, raising the prospect that the attack was the work of the extremist group Islamic State, which from its bases in neighboring Syria and Iraq is embroiled in a regional war against the U.S. and its allies, including Turkey

Images from the scene on Tuesday showed several bloody corpses lying on the ground close to the iconic Ottoman-era Blue Mosque in Sultanahmet, a district home to Istanbul's biggest concentration of historic monuments

Turkey has been hit by a string of deadly attacks this year, but Tuesday's bombing was the first time in recent memory tourists had been targeted in the heart of the city