ANKARA - A SUSPECTED suicide bomber detonated a car outside the southern Turkish city of Mersin on Tuesday, killing himself and leaving nine police officers injured, officials and media reports said.
'We are considering the possibility of a suicide bomber,' Mersin Governor Huseyin Aksoy told Anatolia news agency.
The governor said one person was believed to be in the vehicle, which was detonated when the police tried to stop it in the outskirts of the Mediterranean city.
Nine police officers were injured, he said.
The vehicle was being tailed by the police who had intelligence that a suicide bomber was preparing for an attack in the city, Anatolia said.
The car did not stop despite repeated warnings by the police and exploded on a road outside the city, it added.
Television footage showed police spraying water on a charred metal wreckage.
Two of the wounded policeman were reported to be in a serious condition.
The CNN Turk news channel had earlier said that two assailants were inside the car.
Mersin is one of Turkey's main ports on the Mediterranean coast and has a sizeable population of immigrants from the mainly Kurdish southeast, who have staged violent demonstrations in the city in the past.
Two bomb blasts in a crowded street in Istanbul on July 27 killed 17 people, among them five children, and wounded more than 150.
The Turkish authorities blamed the attack on separatist Kurdish rebels.
Islamist and far-left radicals have also carried out bomb attacks in Turkey in the past.
Suicide drivers detonated four trucks in Istanbul in November 2003, killing about 60 people and causing massive destruction. The attacks were blamed on a Turkish cell of the Al-Qaeda network. -- AFP
