Two Men Planning New Year’s Suicide Attack Detained

Turkey has a 900-km (550-mile) border with Syria, some of which is controlled by Islamic State on the Syrian side and has been used as a transit route by would-be jihadists from early on in Syria's civil war.

The two men - thought to be members of Islamic State (IS) - had entered Turkey from Syria.

The Turkish police have detained two people in Ankara suspected of plotting a New Year suicide attack, say reports.

They were thought to have been preparing an attack on Kizilay square in the centre of the city, where crowds usually gather to celebrate the New Year, a senior government official told the Reuters news agency.

Counter-terror police arrested the pair in the Mamak district in the outskirts of the capital, the private NTV television reported.

The state-run Anadolu Agency, quoting an official from the chief prosecutor's office, says police seized suicide vests armed with bombs.

Turkey is on high security alert after 103 people were killed on 10 October when two suicide bombers ripped through a crowd of peace activists in Ankara, the worst attack in modern Turkey's history.

That attack was blamed on IS jihadis, like two other deadly strikes in the country's Kurdish-dominated southeast earlier in the summer.

Over the past months Turkish authorities have cracked down on the group's so-called "sleeper cells" throughout the country.