Suspected suicide bomber killed in gun fight with cops outside Turkish police headquarters
Attack comes after two killed in courthouse bombing last week
COPS have gunned down a suspected suicide bomber after he opened fire on officers outside a police station in Turkey.
A police officer was wounded in the gun fight and taken to hospital, but officials have said his condition is not serious.
The state-run Anadolu Agency said bomb disposal squads were called to the scene, in Gaziantep, on Turkey’s border with Syria, in case the shooter was wearing a bomb vest.
Turkey is on edge following a spate of attacks that have been blamed on Kurdish militants and the Islamic State group, as well as grappling with the fallout from a failed coup in July.
Last week, a policeman and a courthouse employee were killed when two people detonated an explosives-laden vehicle near a courthouse in Izmir, Turkey’s third-largest city – popular with tourists.
The courthouse attack came just days after 39 people were killed in an Istanbul nightclub during New Year’s celebrations.
ISIS claimed responsibility for the nightclub shooting attack, calling it a reprisal for Turkey’s military operations in Syria.
The suspect in the nightclub attack remains at large.
The Ankara governor’s office has banned all public assemblies and demonstrations for 30 days as a security precaution.
Gaziantep police station was previously targeted on May 1 when two police officers were killed and 22 people wounded in a car bomb attack, which at the time was linked to ISIS.
The city of Gaziantep is 40 miles from the Syrian frontier and has been a focus of Turkish concerns about the spillover of violence across the border.
A suicide bomb attack on a wedding party in Gaziantep killed more than 50 people on August. 20.
Four days later, Turkey’s army launched an operation with Syrian rebels to drive Islamic State away from its southern border.
We pay for your stories! Do you have a story for The Sun Online news team? Email us at tips@the-sun.co.uk or call 0207 782 4368.