A double bombing in the Turkish capital has killed thirty people as they gathered for a peace march.

Videos from the concourse in central Ankara showed more than a dozen bodies on the bloodied ground, several of them draped in banners demanding an end to the state’s three decade-long battle with Kurdish militants.

Turkey's interior ministry said that 30 people had been killed another 126 injured.

The area was to have hosted an anti-government rally organised by leftist groups later in the day, including the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP).

It was the fourth such attack to rock Kurdish targets inside Turkey in a year, underlining the depth of the challenge facing Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish president, in restoring security to a country destabilised by war in neighbouring Syria.

It follows suggestion on Friday from a senior Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) official that a renewed ceasefire with the Turkish state may be on the cards.

Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu was due to hold an emergency meeting with the heads of the police and intelligence agencies and other senior officials on Saturday, his office said.

Although the cause of Saturday’s blast was not immediately clear unclear, local media posited the involvement of a suicide bomber. The speculation evoked an earlier attack on a meeting of mostly Kurdish activists in the border town of Suruc in which 33 people were killed.

That attack inflamed tensions between Kurdish citizens and the Turkish government. It also hastened the end of a three-year long ceasefire between the state and the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

Nationalist violence had torn at the nation’s delicate social fabric in recent months, threatening broad civil unrest just before early elections in November.

A PKK ceasefire could bolster the election prospects of the pro-Kurdish HDP, which deprived the president’s AKP of its single-party majority in a June parliamentary election.

Many Kurds accused Turkish authorities of collaborating with Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant jihadists in Syria, allegations Ankara vehemently denies. Turkey says over 140 members of the security forces have been killed in PKK attacks since and have hit back with a relentless bombing campaign against the group.

(The Telegraph)