Turkish security forces investigating suicide bombings in Istanbul seized
computers from internet cafes owned by a brother of one of the four suspects,
residents of the remote town of Bingol said on Sunday.
The residents also said DNA tests had been carried out on relatives of some
of the suspected suicide bombers.
The DNA tests were to confirm witness descriptions of the bombers and images
of figures caught on security cameras.
Residents and media reports said all four men, aged in their twenties and
thirties, were known to have traveled extensively. They said three had attended
training camps run by Osama bin Laden's network in Pakistan border areas of
Afghanistan.
Police have set up road blocks into the town of 200,000, long an area of
Islamic fundamentalism close to the Iranian and Syrian borders. At least 18
people have been arrested throughout the country in the manhunt so far.
An impoverised rural area in the predominantly Kurdish south-east of Turkey,
the town has endured a succession of devastating earthquakes as well as
years of fierce fighting between the Turkish army and Kurdish rebels.
Residents said they are fearful to give their names but said security forces
seized 20 computers last week from two internet cafes owned by the elder brother
of an Islamic militant believed to be the main planner of both attacks.
Turkish media and residents named the master bomber as Azad Ekinci and his
brother as Metin Ekinci, who was in custody.
"Police officers took the computers for investigation. No one goes near the
cafes anymore," one resident said.
The residents said they believed Azad Ekinci, described as a "serious and
silent student at high school," went to Dubai after the first bombing of two
Istanbul synagogues on November 15.
"He was somebody very close to the fundamentalist Islamist movement," said a
schoolfriend.
Azad Ekinci returned to Turkey some time after the synagogue attacks and
media reports said he drove one of the two suicide trucks used last Thursday to
attack the British consulate and a branch of London-based banking giant HSBC.
His accomplice in Thursday's attack was identified by media as Feridan Ugurlu
who also traveled to Dubai.
All the attacks involved trucks loaded with homemade explosives. They killed
more than 50 people and injured 750.
Turkish authorities have officially named fellow Bingol natives Gokhan
Elaltuntas and Mesut Cabuk as the suicide bombers of the synagogues.
Residents and media reports said Azad Ekinci, Cabuk and Ugurlu all traveled
to Afghanistan at times and Ekinci also fought in Chechnya against Russian
forces.
"Because families in Bingol bring up their children from a young age
according to Islamic principles, once they reach a certain age they join Islamic
groups and they take part in acts of terror," said Mehmet Polat, an unemployed
man in Bingol.
Other residents said the region's poverty, exacerbated by a series of
earthquakes as recently as last May which killed 1,000 people, also drove young
men into the arms of radical groups.
"This event has created a new earthquake for us," said Bingol resident
Abtullatif Yildiz.
