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Turkey Says Evidence Links Syria to Car Bombings - New York Times

Posted: 12 May 2013 08:10 AM PDT

By KAREEM FAHIM and SEBNEM ARSU

Published: May 12, 2013

REYHANLI, Turkey — Turkish authorities said Sunday that 9 people had been detained in twin car bombings a day earlier in southern Turkey that killed 46 people, as funerals were held for at least 20 of the victims in this town near the Syrian border.

Speaking at a news conference, senior government officials said that the investigation had linked the detainees, who were all Turkish citizens, to the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and asserted that the attack was aimed at disrupting Turkey's unity. The officials did not detail any ties between the suspects and Mr. Assad's government, but said the evidence included incriminating statements made by the attackers themselves.

"The incident was carried out by those who have been closely linked with pro-regime groups in Syria," Turkey's interior minister, Muammer Guler, said. "There is no merit in spelling out the names, we know them all."

Turkey's government has strongly backed the rebels fighting Mr. Assad. The Syrian government on Sunday denied an involvement in the bombings, and said Turkey's government bore responsibility. "Syria didn't and will never undertake such acts because our values don't allow us to do this," Omran al-Zoubi, the information minister, was quoted as saying in Damascus.

The developments in the investigation came as Turkey's government struggled to contain the domestic fallout from the bombings, which were among the deadliest attacks on civilians in Turkey in at least a decade. After the explosions, groups of Turkish youths attacked cars and apartments belonging to Syrian refugees living in Reyhanli, where small protests were also held against the government.

Turkish officials, saying they were worried about the integrity of the investigation, banned local media from broadcasting photographs of the bombing sites, in what also seemed an effort to stop the images from inflaming the public.

The bombings on Saturday, within 15 minutes of each other, tore through Reyhanli's municipal headquarters and a busy commercial thoroughfare, damaging shops hundreds of yards away. On Sunday, officials said they had identified 39 victims, and said they included 35 Turkish citizens and 3 Syrians.

If connected to the Syrian war, as Turkey claimed, the attack would be the deadliest spillover since the beginning of the uprising against Mr. Assad in March 2011. In October, shells fired from Syria killed five people in Turkey, and the Turkish government blamed Mr. Assad's forces. At least 14 people died in a separate episode when a car bomb exploded at a border crossing.

As rescue workers in orange jumpsuits combed through the wreckage on Sunday, anxious relatives traveled to Reyhanli's morgue, to try and find information about people who had not been found, or who were still unidentified. They included Ibrahim Yeshar, 30, whose uncle showed a passport-sized picture to news photographers, hoping that someone knew something.

Fatima and Mehmet Aldag hobbled past as they left the hospital, with facial scars and other injuries they suffered in the blast. Mehmet said the explosion hit him "all of a sudden," and wounded three other people in his family. It was was aimed, he said, at "creating problems between Syrians and Turks."

Turkish officials have been especially concerned with the possibility that sectarian tensions that have come to define the civil war in Syria will spill over the border, and trouble ethnically mixed regions of southern Turkey. There are also fears that the sheer numbers of Syrians in Turkey will stoke resentment: around Reyhanli, some 25,000 Syrian refugees live among 90,000 Turkish citizens, according to local officials.

On Sunday, Ibrahim al-Ibrahim, a Syrian refugee in Reyhanli, said he and other Syrians had been sequestered in their homes since the bombings. His windows had been blown out by one of the explosions, a few blocks away. After the bombings, youths threw rocks through the open windowpanes. On Sunday, three young Turkish men smashed the hood and windows of a white van downstairs that belonged to a Syrian neighbor.

Mr. Ibrahim said the bombings occurred as he received word that his house in Syria had been destroyed. "I have no house there, and no house here," he said.

Turkish officials said the detainees included the ringleaders of the attack, and said that several suspects were still at large. Mr. Guler, the interior minister, said some suspects "were the ones who personally planned, did the reconnaissance and hid these cars."

Kareem Fahim reported from Reyhanli, and Sebnem Arsu from Istanbul. Karam Shoumali contributed reporting from Reyhanli.

On Benghazi probe, GOP's Issa says 'Hillary Clinton's not a target' - NBCNews.com

Posted: 12 May 2013 07:22 AM PDT

By Carrie Dann, Political Reporter, NBC News

A top GOP critic pushed back Sunday on charges that Republican efforts to investigate last year's Benghazi attack are designed to inflict political damage on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

"Hillary Clinton's not a target," said House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa on NBC's Meet the Press. "President Obama is not a target."

Issa, who heads a panel probing the assault on the diplomatic outpost that killed four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, said he will seek depositions from Benghazi review board heads Ambassador Thomas Pickering and retired Adm. Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The interagency process of modifying talking points in the wake of the attack scrubbed the fact that the incident was "a terrorist attack from the get-go," Issa said Sunday.

"The American people were effectively lied to for a period of about a month," he charged. "That's important to get right."

Issa's committee held a high-profile hearing last week on the Benghazi attack. The California Republican claimed Sunday that Pickering - the man who led an independent review of the attacks on behalf of the State Department - refused to testify at that hearing.

Pickering flatly denied that he was unwilling to appear.

"I said the day before the hearings I was willing to appear, to come from the very hearings [Issa] excluded me from," Pickering told NBC's David Gregory. "We were told the majority said I was not welcome at that hearing; I could come at some other time."

Issa said he was unaware of Pickering's late notice, which the ambassador said he communicated through the White House, but added that a private deposition - which he intends to formally request Monday from the ambassador - is the more appropriate way to begin the inquiry.

"The fact is we don't want to have some sort of a stage show," Issa said.

Issa spokesman Frederick Hill said in a statement that Oversight committee Republicans never received a request for Pickering to testify.

"We challenge him to name the White House official who he was in contact with and the White House official whom he falsely says relayed his interest in testifying to Chairman Issa," Hill said.

Republicans have been dogged in their questioning of the administration's response to the attack, with leaked documents revealing last week that officials at the State Department suggested edits to talking points that erased references to terrorist groups.

While Hillary Clinton has stated publicly that she was not involved in that editing process, criticism of the former State Department chief and much-discussed possible presidential candidate has been a strong subtext of the Benghazi debate.

Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, said on Meet the Press that Issa's panel has deliberately put Clinton's ambitions in its crosshairs.

"My concern is when Hillary Clinton's name is mentioned 32 times in a hearing, then the point of the hearing is to discredit the Secretary of State, who has very high popularity and may well be a candidate for president," Feinstein said.

Likely 2016 Republican candidate Sen. Rand Paul excoriated Clinton in a speech Friday in key campaign state Iowa, saying her role in the Benghazi episode "should preclude her from holding higher office."

"I think that's nonsense," Feinstein said of Paul's claim. "And I think the American people will think that's nonsense."

This story was originally published on Sun May 12, 2013 11:28 AM EDT

Kredit: www.nst.com.my

Ahad, 12 Mei 2013