Turkish police kill two female militants after attack on police station

The women threw several grenades then opened fire at riot-police headquarters in an Istanbul suburb, according to a local news agency.

Special forces officers cordon off a street on March 3, 2016, following an attack by two women on a police station in the Istandbul suburb of Bayrampasa, Turkey. Osman Orsal / Reuters
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Istanbul // Turkish police killed two female leftist militants who hurled grenades and opened fire at an Istanbul police station on Thursday.

The pair, who were identified as members of the outlawed ultra-leftist Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front, or DHKP-C, had taken refuge in an apartment after their attack.

Police then launched an assault on the apartment, and the two were “neutralised”, Istanbul governor Vasip Sahin said. Two police officers were lightly wounded.

The women were identified as Cigdem Yaksi and Berna Yilmaz, the official Anatolia news agency said.

According to the Dogan news agency, the women threw several grenades then opened fire at the riot-police headquarters.

Officers returned fire, injuring one of the attackers before they fled to the nearby building. Security footage broadcast on television showed them brandishing weapons they pulled out of their handbags.

Turkey has been on a state of alert for months over a series of deadly attacks on its soil.

Last month, 29 people were killed in a car bombing that targeted a military convoy in Ankara, which was claimed by the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (TAK). The group has been linked to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).

In the last year, there were four deadly bomb attacks blamed on ISIL extremists, including the deadliest in Turkey’s modern history that killed 103 people in Ankara in October.

But there have also been sporadic attacks by radicals from the DHKP-C, which seeks a Marxist revolution in Turkey among the working classes, but also espouses a fiercely anti-Western and anti-Nato agenda.

Known until the mid-1990s as Devrimci Sol (Revolutionary Left), the DHKP-C has claimed a string of attacks in Turkey in recent months, including a gun attack on the US embassy in Istanbul last year.

But many of its assaults have been small in scale and sometimes even amateurish in nature.

It claimed the hostage-taking on March 31 of prosecutor Mehmet Selim Kiraz at his Istanbul office, in which the captive and both hostage-takers were killed during a police raid.

One of its most high profile crimes was the in January 1996. killing of Ozdemir Sabanci, the billionaire head of one of Turkey’s largest industrial empires.

Last month, Turkey arrested alleged DHKP-C member Ismail Akkol over the Sabanci assassination and accused him of planning a suicide attack.

* Agence France-Presse