Turkey’s Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu confirmed the blast followed mechanical work being carried out in a police workshop near the Police Department’s HQ and appeared to be an accident.
"The blast was in a part of the building for riot police, where maintenance is carried out on vehicles," Soylu told CNN Turk, reports Reuters. "At the moment, it seems there is no outside interference, and the explosion came from the vehicle under repair. One person is trapped under the wreckage.”
Pictures of huge plumes of smoke over the largely Kurdish city’s residential district of Balgar were shared by locals online.
Security footage shared online shows the moment of the explosion.
Photos from the scene show emergency workers wading through the vast amount of rubble in search of trapped persons.
Police issued a warning to those in the vicinity of the explosion to keep all windows and doors shut due to a potential gas leak, according to local media.
***
12:03
An explosion in a police compound in Turkey's southeastern city of Diyarbakir wounded several people and sent a large plume of grey smoke rising over surrounding buildings on Tuesday, but the cause of the blast was not immediately clear.
A police source said the explosion appeared to have taken place in a vehicle repair section of the police compound, causing part of the roof to collapse and wounding at least four people. The Dogan news agency said one was in a critical condition.
The blast comes ahead of a hotly contested referendum on Sunday on broadening President Tayyip Erdogan's powers, a constitutional change opposed by many in the country's predominantly Kurdish southeast.
The explosion was in the central, largely residential district of Baglar, where a car bombing by suspected Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants wounded scores of people last November.
Diyarbakir is the largest city in Turkey's southeast, where the PKK has fought an insurgency against the state for more than three decades to press demands for Kurdish autonomy. Violence has flared since a ceasefire collapsed in July 2015.
More about: #Diyarbakir
