REYHANLI, Turkey - Turkish authorities said Sunday that nine people had been detained in twin car bombings a day earlier in southern Turkey that killed 46 people, as funerals were held for at least 20 of the victims in this town near the Syrian border.
Speaking at a news conference, senior government officials said that the investigation had linked the detainees, who were all Turkish citizens, to the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad, and asserted that the attack was aimed at disrupting Turkey’s unity. The officials did not detail any ties between the suspects and Assad’s government, but they said the evidence included incriminating statements made by the attackers themselves.
“The incident was carried out by those who have been closely linked with pro-regime groups in Syria,” said Turkey’s interior minister, Muammer Guler. “There is no merit in spelling out the names. We know them all.”
Turkey’s government has strongly backed the rebels fighting Assad. The Syrian government on Sunday denied any involvement in the bombings and said that Turkey’s government bore responsibility.
“Syria didn’t and will never undertake such acts because our values don’t allow us to do this,” Omran al-Zoubi, the information minister, was quoted as saying in Damascus.
The developments in the investigation came as Turkey’s government struggled to contain the domestic fallout from the bombings, which were among the deadliest attacks on civilians in Turkey in at least a decade. After the explosions, groups of Turkish youths attacked cars and apartments belonging to Syrian refugees living in Reyhanli, where small protests were also held against the government.
Turkish officials, saying they were worried about the integrity of the investigation, barred the local news media from broadcasting photographs of the bombing sites, in what also seemed an effort to stop the images from inflaming the public.
The bombings on Saturday, within 15 minutes of each other, tore through Reyhanli’s municipal headquarters and a busy commercial thoroughfare, damaging shops hundreds of yards away. On Sunday, officials said they had identified 39 victims, including 35 Turkish citizens and three Syrians.
If connected to the Syrian war, as Turkey claimed, the attack would be the deadliest spillover since the beginning of the uprising against Assad in March 2011. In October, shells fired from Syria killed five people in Turkey, and the Turkish government blamed Assad’s forces. At least 14 people died in a separate episode when a car bomb exploded at a border crossing.
As rescue workers in orange jumpsuits combed the wreckage Sunday, anxious relatives traveled to Reyhanli’s morgue to try to find information about people who had not been found or who were still unidentified. The uncle of Ibrahim Yeshar, 30, showed a passport-sized picture to news photographers, hoping that someone knew something.
Turkish officials have been especially concerned with the possibility that sectarian tensions that have come to define the civil war in Syria will spill over the border and trouble ethnically mixed regions of southern Turkey.
There are also fears that the sheer number of Syrians in Turkey will stoke resentment: Around Reyhanli, about 25,000 Syrian refugees live among 90,000 Turkish citizens, according to local officials.
On Sunday, Ibrahim al-Ibrahim, a Syrian refugee in Reyhanli, said he and other Syrians had been sequestered in their homes since the bombings.His windows had been blown out by one of the explosions, a few blocks away. After the bombings, youths threw rocks through the open windowpanes. On Sunday, three young Turkish men smashed the hood and windows of a white van that belonged to a Syrian neighbor.
Al-Ibrahim said the bombings occurred as he received word that his house in Syria had been destroyed. “I have no house there, and no house here,” he said.
Turkish officials said that the detainees included the ringleaders of the attack and that several suspects were still at large. Guler, the interior minister, said some suspects “were the ones who personally planned, did the reconnaissance and hid these cars.”
In Syria on Sunday, rebels released four Filipino United Nations peacekeepers they abducted last week in a dramatic act that prompted warningsfrom the Philippines that the nation might pull out its contingent from the Golan Heights.
Meanwhile, a Syrian official said Assad’s troops have the right to enter the Israeli-occupied Golan whenever they wish - a veiled threat toward Israel to stay out of Syria’s conflict.
The four Filipinos, seized Tuesday, were apparently unharmed, but will undergo a medical checkup and stress debriefing, said Brig. Gen. Domingo Tutaan.
A statement by the rebel group holding the peacekeepers - the Yarmouk Martyrs Brigade - said the four were handed over to a U.N. delegation in the border area on Sunday, but provided no other details.
The peacekeepers are part of a U.N. contingent that patrols a buffer zone between Syria and the Golan Heights, a plateau Israel captured from Syria in 1967.
Information for this article was contributed by Kareem Fahim, Sebnem Arsu and Karam Shoumali of The New York Times; and by Albert Aji and Sarah El Deeb of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 6 on 05/13/2013