A Turkish court on Tuesday charged nine people on suspicion of involvement in the suicide attacks that killed dozens of people at the British Consulate and the HSBC headquarters in Istanbul. The state-run Anatolian news agency said the court charged them after a lengthy interrogation. It added that three other people detained by the police after last Thursday’s explosions had been freed. The suspects include relatives of the bombers who came from Bingol, a centre of Islamic fundamentalism in the impoverished and mainly Kurdish southeast region, near the border with Iran. PM Tayyip Erdogan said that an Al Qaeda link has not been proved yet, but that the four suicide bombers were Turkish citizens with global connections. Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul dismissed reports that a team of British detectives now in Turkey, would visit the city of Bingol, where police have already seized computers from Internet cafes owned by the brother of one of the bombers.
