On the night of Dec. 10, Istanbul was hit hard by a double suicide attack. First, a car bomb rammed into a bus carrying riot police who had just finished work at the Besiktas stadium, in the heart of the city. Then, a minute later, a suicide bomber marched toward the scene, apparently to kill the people who would come to help the victims of the first attack. Police spotted the second attacker, and he detonated his explosives prematurely. Still, 44 people lost their lives. Many of them were police officers, others were just bystanders.

The government soon said the attackers were members of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), the separatist group fighting Turkey for Kurdish autonomy since 1984. A little later, the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (TAK) claimed the attack, but this did not make much of a difference. In Turkey, the TAK is known as the offshoot of the PKK, created to claim responsibility for radical acts of violence with which the PKK does not want to be associated.

Naturally, the attack led to a wave of anger against the PKK across Turkey. The PKK, however, was not the only target of the fury. The United States and the European Union (EU) also received blame. When crowds gathered at the crime scene to commemorate the “martyrs,” they also protested against the EU. When a delegation of consuls general in Istanbul, headed by American and European diplomats, visited ground zero to lay flowers in honor of the victims, some in the crowd gathered yelled, “The murderers are here.”

The pro-government media was more fierce. Yeni Safak ran the headline, “Heinous Attack in Besiktas Is Claimed by PKK, the Subcontractor of Europe and America.” Aksam, another mouthpiece of the same political ilk, went with the headline, “Whose Dogs Are You?” a rhetorical question aimed at the PKK and pointing to Martin Schulz, president of the European Parliament. Some Twitter trolls even pointed fingers at Western journalists in Turkey, accusing them of having advance knowledge of the attack, without any logic other than mindless hate. The controversial mayor of Ankara, Melih Gokcek, even claimed that the BBC had been “prepared” for the attack.