Even Turkey

UP TO 20 people were killed and 250 wounded on Saturday, when car bombs shattered two Istanbul synagogues as worshippers celebrated the Sabb...

UP TO 20 people were killed and 250 wounded on Saturday, when car bombs shattered two Istanbul synagogues as worshippers celebrated the Sabbath, officials said.

Turkish Interior Minister Abdulkadir Aksu said he could not rule out the possible involvement of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda, which has been blamed for attacks on other Jewish targets in the past 18 months.

In a televised statement, Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul said he believed there were ‘‘international links’’ in two bomb attacks which ripped through two synagogues in Istanbul on Saturday. ‘‘It is clear that this is a terrorist event with international links,’’ Gul said. He added that he believed suicide attackers were behind the two blasts. ‘‘This is the first time we have seen such blasts. We believe they were caused by suicide attackers,’’ Gul said in televised remarks.

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‘‘There were two simultaneous attacks at two central synagogues, the main synagogue Neve Shalom and another large synagogue, Sisli,’’ Amira Arnon, Israel’s Consul General to Turkey told Israel Army radio. Aksu put the death toll at 15, with 146 injured, but police officers at the scene said as many as 20 had died. Israel denounced the blasts as ‘‘criminal terror attacks’’.

The Chief Rabbi of Turkey, Yitzhak Haleva, told Israel Radio: ‘‘I was praying when suddenly there was an explosion under us and all the windows blew open.’’ He said his son had been hurt in the blast at the synagogue in the Sisli district, named by Israel Radio as Beit Israel, and was undergoing an operation in hospital.

At the central Neve Shalom synagogue, the scene was similar. Injured people covered in blood were carried on stretchers from around the building, the target of a 1986 attack by Palestinians in which 22 people were killed.

‘‘We suspect car bombs caused both explosions,’’ said Kadir Topbas, head of a local council in which one of the synagogues was based.

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A radical Turkish Islamist group known as IBDA/C — the Islamic Great Eastern Raiders/Front — claimed responsibility in a call to Turkey’s semi-official Anatolia news agency. Yitzhak Bibas told Israel Radio he was among about 300 people at the Sisli synagogue attending Sabbath prayers and suggested that the worst of the casualties may have been among passers-by.

Jewish sites have been targeted in recent attacks blamed on militants linked to Al Qaeda — notably in Casablanca in May and a Tunisian synagogue bombed in April 2002.

‘‘There is a high chance of sabotage (in these blasts),’’ CNN Turk television quoted Interior Minister Aksu as saying. (Reuters)