DİHA - Dicle News Agency

ÖMER ÇELİK

DİYARBAKIR (DİHA) – New information on the June 5th bombing of a Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) rally in Diyarbakır has revealed that another perspective on the bombing.

The final toll of the bombing in Diyarbakır's İstasyon Square was three deaths and 402 wounded, 16 of them seriously. Yesterday the Minister of Food and Agriculture, Mehdi Eker, delivered the state's announcement on the bombing at the Diyarbakır governor's office. The Minister announced that the investigations, which continued late into the night, have revealed that one of the bombs involved TNT, BBs and a cell phone. The composition and construction of the second bomb is still unknown.

Information that has reached Dicle News Agency provides another perspective on the bombing. 17-year-old S.Z. is the young man who operates the tea stand under which one of the bombs was placed. S.Z. was himself wounded in the bombing and is under treatment. He is only allowed visits from immediate family. S.Z.'s father HakanZeren, 42, shared his son's eyewitness accounts with Dicle News agency.

Hakan says that, as is visible in the videos and photographs our agency has broadcast of the bombing, a man approaches his son. The man is tall and thin, with long hair. The man approaches with a plastic bag. The man told S.Z. that he was from the city of Maraş and asked if he could leave the bag containing his shoes in a shoe box, since he didn't know anyone from here. Although at first the boy did not want to accept the bag, the man (who said he was named Ferit or Ferdi) appealed to the boy's conscience and finally left the bag alongside the tea cart.

At one point, the boy took a break from the busy tea sales to look in the bag. He found a yellow shoebox taped shut. The boy tried to open the box, but it was taped shut. At that point, customers came and the boy left the box behind.

Later, just as SelahattinDemirtaş, the HDP general co-chair, was about to take to the stage, the bomb exploded, apparently detonated from a distance using a cell phone. The boy said that was when he was thrown into the air. The next thing he remembers, he was on the ground.

Hakan also noted that one factor that may have changed the situation was that there was a canister of gas next to the stand in the early videos, but Hakan said his son disposed of the canister in the schoolyard of the school behind the explosion. If he hadn't, the explosion might have been much more violent.

Hakan, angry like many of the victims and their relatives, called for the perpetrators to be found immediately.

(cm/nt)