On the night of Dec. 10, Istanbul was hit hard by a double suicide attack. First, a car bomb rammed into a bus carrying riot police who had just finished work at the Besiktas stadium, in the heart of the city. Then, a minute later, a suicide bomber marched toward the scene, apparently to kill the people who would come to help the victims of the first attack. Police spotted the second attacker, and he detonated his explosives prematurely. Still, 44 people lost their lives. Many of them were police officers, others were just bystanders.
The government soon said the attackers were members of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), the separatist group fighting Turkey for Kurdish autonomy since 1984. A little later, the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (TAK) claimed the attack, but this did not make much of a difference. In Turkey, the TAK is known as the offshoot of the PKK, created to claim responsibility for radical acts of violence with which the PKK does not want to be associated.
