Istanbul police station attacked by women militants

PanARMENIAN.Net - Two women opened fire and threw a grenade at a Turkish police bus as it arrived at a station in an Istanbul suburb on Thursday, March 3, footage from the Dogan news agency showed, according to Reuters.

Local television stations said there were no casualties.

Turkey's state-run news agency said later that police in Istanbul have shot and killed the two women.

The women had escaped the scene in a vehicle and hid inside a building a short distance from the police station. Police then surrounded the building and launched an operation to apprehend them.

One of the women threw a grenade and the other opened fire with what appeared to be a machine gun as the riot police bus drove towards the station entrance in the Bayrampasa district of Turkey's biggest city, the footage showed.

Police returned fire, injuring one of the women, before tracking them to a nearby building, CNN Turk said. Special forces units were sent to the area and residents were evacuated as security forces prepared to carry out an operation, it said.

Footage on Turkish television stations showed the street cordoned off as armed plainclothes police in bullet-proof vests emerged from the police station, Reuters says.

Attacks on the security forces have increased as violence flares in the country's predominantly Kurdish southeast, where a ceasefire between Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) militants and the state collapsed last July.

The PKK, considered a terrorist group by Turkey, the United States and the European Union, launched a separatist armed rebellion against Turkey more than three decades ago. More than 40,000 people, mostly Kurds, have since been killed.

Turkey has also become a target for Islamic State militants, who are blamed for three suicide bombings - one last year in the town of Suruc near the Syrian border and another in the capital, Ankara, and one in Istanbul in January. Those attacks killed more than 140 people.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for Thursday's attack.