A suicide bomber killed three police officers and wounded at least nine people in the southern Turkish city of Gaziantep on Sunday during a police raid on a suspected Daesh safehouse, a local official and security sources said.
The bomber detonated explosives as police raided the house in the Besyuzevler neighborhood of the city, some 40 km (25 miles) from the Syrian border, Abdullah Nejat Kocer, a local member of Parliament from the ruling AK Party, told reporters.
A second suicide bomber detonated explosives during another police raid related to the same investigation at an apartment in the city’s Gazikent suburb, but no other people were killed, a police official at the scene said. That blast blew the front wall out of the building, according to a Reuters witness.
Kocer said three police officers were killed in the Besyuzevler blast. Turkish media had initially spoken of more than one attacker but the governor and the local prosecutor’s office said the body of just one bomber was found at the scene.
Six of the wounded were also police, two of them left in a critical condition in hospital. The three other people wounded were Syrian nationals, Kocer told reporters.
Security sources said police had pursued a vehicle believed to be carrying explosives to the house, where a group of Syrian nationals were thought to be sheltering, before raiding it.
Turkey has seen a spate of suicide bombings by militants with suspected Daesh links. 
A suicide bomb killed more than 50 people, many of them children, at a Kurdish wedding in Gaziantep in August.
Turkish security forces have repeatedly raided houses in Istanbul, Gaziantep and other cities in a crackdown on suspected militants with Daesh links.

Source: Arab News