Turkish investigation links the incident to a ‘likely’ act of terrorism ANKARA, Turkey: A bomb went off in a car in southeast Turkey near the border with Syria on Friday, killing three Syrians who were inside the vehicle, Turkey’s interior minister said. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that initial findings showed the blast may be terrorism related. The blast occurred inside a car some 750 meters from a local government office in the border town of Reyhanli, in Hatay province, where officials are carrying out inspections to determine its cause, Erdogan said. He said it was clear the explosion was the result of a bomb inside the vehicle detonating. Security sources said one of the Syrian passengers in the car was a suicide bomber whose explosive device detonated early, causing the blast. The sources said the passengers in the car were being investigated for potential links to Daesh, and added that one person was also wounded in the blast. Reyhanli is home to thousands of Syrian refugees. Following a series of bombings in the region in 2013, Turkey tightened controls along its 900-km border with Syria. Earlier, Erdogan said three Syrians were killed in the explosion, but Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu later said only two were killed. The third Syrian was in serious condition. Soylu said the explosion was caused by a handmade bomb which went off while the car was in transit. He said all three Syrians were legally registered in Turkey. He did not identify them. “It is clear that there was a bomb inside the vehicle,” Erdogan said. “The findings at the moment indicate that it was ... linked to terrorism.”On May 11, 2013, two car bomb attacks in Reyhanli ripped through the town, which is in Hatay province, killing 52 people, including Syrian refugees. At the time, Turkey accused a group loyal to Syria’s Bashar Assad of carrying out the attacks. In May, Turkey handed down 53 life sentences without parole to Yusuf Nazik, the man authorities say planned the 2013 bomb attack. Turkey was also hit by a wave of attacks in 2015 and 2016 blamed on Daesh and Kurdish militants that killed around 300 people. In the last major attack, at least 39 people were killed when a gunman opened fire at an Istanbul nightclub during New Year celebrations in the early hours of 2017. The attack was claimed by Daesh. Turkey has been one of the biggest supporters of the opposition fighting Syrian regime forces during the eight-year conflict in Syria. It hosts some 3.5 million Syrian refugees.