Deadly explosion rocks Turkey-Syria border crossing
An explosion near a border crossing between Syria and Turkey killed as many as 29 people and wounded many others yesterday, an activist group monitoring the Syrian civil war said.
An explosion near a border crossing between Syria and Turkey killed as many as 29 people and wounded many others yesterday, an activist group monitoring the Syrian civil war said.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the explosion occurred at a garage near the Bab al-Salameh border crossing in the northern Syrian province of Aleppo. The garage is used by passengers who come to or leave the crossing point, said Rami Abdurrahman, the Observatory's chief.
Abdurrahman said it was not immediately clear whether a suicide bomber had caused the blast. He said those wounded were being treated in Turkish and Syrian hospitals. He said the dead included at least five women and three children.
The Local Coordination Committees, another activist group, said a car bomb at the border crossing killed and wounded "many" people.
In Turkey, a government official said 48 wounded Syrians were brought across the border for treatment and that 13 of them had died. Thirty-five of them were being treated in various hospitals near the Turkish-Syrian border, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity as he wasn't authorised to release information to journalists.
An amateur video posted online showed women, men and children at the scene of the blast, which set several cars and motorcycles on fire.
Such explosions have occurred in the past in border areas near Turkey.
More than 150,000 people have died since March 2011 and hundreds of thousands of people have been wounded in Syria's civil war, which started as a series of largely peaceful protests.
