Two bombs exploded within minutes of each other late on Sunday in a crowded pedestrian area of Istanbul, killing at least 17 people and wounding more than 150 in what the city’s governor called a terrorist attack.

The double bombing appeared to be the worst case of terrorist violence in Turkey in nearly five years and seemed to take the Turkish authorities by surprise. There were no immediate claims of responsibility, although Kurdish separatist militants were initially suspected.

Residents in buildings near the explosion sites hung Turkish flags from their windows and balconies in reaction to rumours that the separatists were responsible. There was no obvious reason the Istanbul neighbourhood that was bombed, which is almost completely residential, had been the object of a terrorism plot.

The first blast, which the police and witnesses said was relatively minor, attracted scores of onlookers curious about the commotion, with at least some of them thinking it was caused by a gas leak explosion. Many of the onlookers were then hit by flying shrapnel and debris in the second, more powerful blast about 10 minutes after the first and about 20 yards away, the governor of Istanbul, Muammer Guler, said in a news briefing broadcast by Turkish television.

Witnesses described a scene of panic with victims lying on the street in pools of blood. The bombings seemed timed to exploit the summer pastime of many residents of the pedestrian area of Gungoren, in central Istanbul, to stroll in the cool late evening before going to bed. “It’s surely a terror attack, there’s no doubt,” Governor Guler said. “Because people were gathered after the first explosion, and because the second explosion happened right after, people sitting right across got severely injured.”

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