The article, titled “Putin’s Hand,” insisted that Sunday’s blast came just ahead of President Erdogan’s visit to Azerbaijan and, therefore, was not coincidental, given Russia’s “open cooperation” with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party and Syria’s Kurdish Democratic Union Party, and a threat to avenge the November 24, 2015 downing of its warplane by a Turkish F-16 fighter jet.
The author also saw a link between the January 12 explosion in Istanbul and a visit to Moscow by Selahattin Demirtas, co-chair of the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party.
The Daily Star also dismissed as “suspect” the fact that President Putin was the first foreign leader to express his condolences to the Turkish people in the immediate wake of the Ankara blast, even though the newspaper’s initial reaction to Putin’s message was fairly positive.
Russia is not the only one Ankara feels free to blame for every bad thing happening in the country though.
After the May 2013 explosion in the city of Reihanly, the bloodiest such attack in the country’s modern history, President Erdogan pointed the finger at Syrian President Bashar Assad, claiming that the Turkish authorities had enough documentary evidence to prove it.
According to Ankara, the perpetrators of the deadly attack wanted to “thwart the process of peaceful settlement of the Kurdish problem.”
Shortly after it transpired that the explosives-packed vehicles had actually been sent to Reihanly by a Haisam Toubalijeh, also known as Keysem Topalca, with links to MIT, Turkey's intelligence organization.
According to intelligence reports leaked to the press, Ankara had full knowledge of the planned attack but did nothing to prevent it.
In July 2015 a 20-year-old Turkish student was identified as the suicide bomber who killed 33 youth Socialist activists in the town of Suruc.
The attacker was an ethnic Kurd from Turkey's south-eastern province of Adiyaman and reportedly had links to the Daesh terrorist group.
Pro-government newspapers, The Daily Star included, then wrote about “outside forces working hard to undermine the Turkish government.”
None of them bothered to ask how come a Daesh terrorist had managed to infiltrate leftwing groups so closely watched by police and intelligence agencies.
On October 11, 2015 twin explosions outside Ankara’s main train station left over 100 people dead and around 250 wounded. The tragedy happened as hundreds of young people had gathered to protest against violence between authorities and the Kurdish militant group, the PKK.
Even before the investigation had time to name the suspects, President Erdogan blamed the Kurdistan Workers Party, the People Democracy party, the Syrian intelligence and the Syrian Kurds from the Democratic Union Party.
Even though all available evidence linked the attack to Daesh, the newspaper Akşam accused the Kurds for the deadly attack.
The newspaper Yeni Şafak, owned by Presidentnet Erdogan’s son-in-law, named PKK and the leftwing Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front (DHKP/C) as the main culprits and Selahattin Demirtas as the “main instigator.”
All these attempts by pro-government media to shift the blame away from Daesh terrorists raised angry protests within Turkish society.
