Ankara - Turkey's Constitutional Court began deliberations Monday on whether to close down the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) which is charged with undermining the secular system.
Turkey's chief prosecutor, Abdurrahman Yalcinkaya, brought the case to close down the AKP earlier, telling the court that it was "clear and present danger that (the AKP) wants to impose shariah law."
The prosecutor has claimed that attempts by the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to allow women to wear Islamic- style headscarves at universities were proof that the party aims to impose Islamic-style law.
Ankara - Police experts on Monday were searching for clues as to who was behind a bomb attack in Istanbul Sunday night that left 16 people dead and 154 injured, the Anadolu news agency reported.
A first small bomb which had been placed in a rubbish bin on a crowded pedestrian street in the suburb of Gungoren on the European side of Istanbul exploded at around 9:45 pm (1645 GMT) and was followed by a much larger blast around 10 to 12 minutes later and around 50 metres down the street, Istanbul Governor Muammer Guler told reporters at the scene of the blast.
Mazar-e Sharif, Afghanistan - German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Monday condemned the double bomb blasts that hit a crowded street in Istanbul as "a blind act of terrorism."
Ankara - Turkish warplanes bombed Kurdish rebel targets inside northern Iraq Wednesday night, the Turkish General Staff announced on Thursday.
In a short statement on its official website, the General Staff said Turkish Air Force planes successfully hit 13 suspected Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) targets inside northern Iraq. The statement said that special care was taken not to hit civilian properties.
No information on what kind of targets were hit nor their locations inside Iraq was given in the statement.
Ludwigshafen, Germany - German prosecutors closed the file Wednesday on a building fire that killed nine Turkish Alawite people in Germany, saying they were convinced it had been an accident.
Many Turkish people have expressed a feeling that the February 3 fire may have been a cleverly disguised racist attack.
But prosecutors said they had "almost certainly" ruled out arson. The fire had begun under the staircase of the multistoreyed apartment block in the factory town of Ludwigshafen, south of Frankfurt.
No technical defect was found in the building, so the fire must have been caused by some sort of "negligent behaviour."
Ankara - Police experts on Monday were searching for clues as to who was behind a bomb attack in Istanbul Sunday night that left 16 people dead and 154 injured, the Anadolu news agency reported.
