Deadly suicide bombings hit Damascus police station

Damascus has been largely insulated from the worst of the violence during the country’s brutal six-year war, but several bomb attacks have shaken the city, AFP reported.

Syria’s Interior Ministry said two suicide bombers had blown themselves up at the police station in the southern district of Midan, leading to the “deaths of a number of civilians and a number of policemen”.

The so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitor of the war, said at least 11 people were killed in the attack, among them six police officers.

The monitor also reported that a car bomb had been detonated during the attack, but state media made no mention of a third blast.

Interior Minister Mohammed Shaar told reporters that one of the attackers had managed to enter the police station and reach the first floor of the building.

State television showed images of damage from inside the building, with a black police uniform shirt covered in dust lying in the rubble of partially collapsed walls.

The entire front of one room on the first floor had been blown out by the explosion, and inside what remained, twisted bits of metal were scattered across the rubble.

Policemen carried one body away from the scene wrapped inside a white tarpaulin.

Damascus has also been rocked by occasional bomb blasts throughout the Syrian conflict, including previous attacks on Midan, a middle-class residential and shopping district.

In December 2016, three police officers were wounded when a seven-year-old girl walked into the neighbourhood’s police station wearing an explosive belt that was remotely detonated.

Terrorist groups have been gradually expelled from territory in the capital they once held, though they maintain a presence in a handful of positions, including the Jobar neighborhood.

They also hold territory in the Eastern Ghouta region outside the capital, and have regularly launched rockets into the city.