Turkish police detained 37 Islamic State suspects in anti-terror operations in provinces across Turkey, media said on Wednesday, while officials said another suspect was held carrying over five kg of explosives at the border with Syria.
The governor's office in the southern province of Hatay said the Syrian citizen was caught on Tuesday trying to cross illegally into Turkey from Syria with 5.25 kg of TNT and nine detonators.
Police detained 25 people in simultaneous raids in nine provinces including Istanbul overnight, targeting Islamic State suspects who had been on a security watchlist for the past four months, the private Dogan news agency reported.
In a separate set of operations, police detained 12 individuals, 2 of them children, in southern Adana province with suspected links to the Islamic State overnight, Dogan said, adding that one of them was a 12-year-old Indonesian girl.
Turkey has detained more than 5,000 Islamic State suspects in recent years and deported some 3,290 foreign militants from 95 different countries, according to Turkish officials. It has also refused entry to at least 38,269 individuals.
