Turkey insisted on Tuesday there was an indisputable link between Syrian Kurdish fighters and last week's deadly attack in Ankara, amid growing confusion over the identity of the bomber, AFP reports.
After the February 18 suicide car bomb attack on a convoy of military buses in the capital that left 29 people dead, Turkish officials insisted the bomber was a Syrian Kurd working on behalf of the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD).
Fearing the ambitions of the PYD and its People's Protection Units (YPG) militia, Ankara has been keen to play up the links between the Syrian Kurdish fighters and the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) which has waged a decades-long insurgency against the Turkish state.
But the radical Turkey-based Kurdish group that claimed the attack said the bomber was a Turkish Kurd, an assertion reportedly supported by DNA tests.
"Whatever the judicial inquiry concludes over the identity of the bomber, it is clear that the bomber came from Rojava, the area of the PYD," Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus told reporters, referring to Kurdish-controlled northern Syria.