Turkey’s prime minister has backtracked on a statement by the president which said the suicide bomber who attacked a Kurdish wedding was a child.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in the aftermath of the attack in Gazantiep, which killed 54, that the bomber was aged between 12 and 14.
PM Binali Yildirim says it is uncertain whether it was a child. Mr Erdogan has blamed so-called Islamic State (IS).
Most of the victims of the bombing were children, media reports say.
“A clue has not yet been found concerning the perpetrator,” Mr Yildirim told reporters, following a weekly cabinet meeting.
He said the earlier statement identifying the attacker as a child was a “guess” based on witness accounts.
Gaziantep, near the Syrian border, is known to contain several IS cells. Twenty-nine victims of the attack, which took place on Sunday, were under the age of 18, reports said, with one official saying 22 were under the age of 14.
Thirteen of those killed were women, Turkish media said. Sixty-six people are still in hospital, 14 of them in a serious condition, Dogan news agency reported.
One woman lost four children in the attack, the Haberturk newspaper reported. Emine Arhan told the title “if it wasn’t for my only surviving child, I would have killed myself”.
Another victim was a nine-year-old girl who had stayed on at the party to see the bride after her parents had left, according to the Vatan newspaper.
A disproportionately large number of women and children were killed in the attack because it targeted henna night, a part of the celebration attended mainly by women and children, says BBC Monitoring’s Turkey analyst Pinar Sevinclidir.
Hurriyet newspaper said the type of bomb, which contained scraps of metal, was similar to those used in previous attacks on pro-Kurdish gatherings.
Kurdish fighters, backed by the US-led coalition, have been at the forefront of the fight against IS in Syria.
Prosecutors said a search was also under way for two people believed to have accompanied the suspected attacker to the wedding party but who left before the blast.
In a defiant speech on Monday, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said IS should be “completely cleansed” from the border area with Turkey.
He was speaking amid reports that Turkish-backed Syrian rebels were preparing to try to seize the IS-held border town of Jarablus.
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