HSBC Holdings PLC said some of its employees were killed when two buildings in Istanbul were hit by bomb blasts Thursday.
However, the bank also said it will not pull out of Turkey.
HSBC suffered “a number of fatalities” in the explosions, which struck its Turkish headquarters and another building in a different part of the city, spokesman Adrian Russell said in a interview, without providing more details.
One of the bombs exploded near the British consulate, killing the consul general, Roger Short, Turkish authorities said. The other bomb went off in the business district of Levent in front of HSBC’s Turkish headquarters.
The bombs killed at least 27 people and injured as many as 450, Interior Minister Abdulkadir Aksu said. Ten employees of Iran’s Bank Mellat were also injured, four of them critically, the Iranian News Agency reported, citing Younes Hormozian, the manager of the bank’s Istanbul branch.
HSBC closed its branches in Turkey on Thursday, but it had plans to reopen them on Friday, Ahmet Erelcin, a spokesman in Turkey, said in a statement read before television cameras. The bank’s data network was not damaged, he said.
Citigroup Inc. also shut its offices as a precautionary measure Thursday, though it said it had no indication its offices or staff had been affected by the attacks. Credit Suisse First Boston Corp.’s Istanbul office, which is about 200 meters from HSBC’s offices, sustained no damage, said Tugba Ozguven, an administrative aide.
HSBC opened its first office in Turkey in 1990, and in October 2001 it bought Demirbank TAS. The bank now has 157 branches in the country, according to its Web site. The 15-story tower that was bombed had been Demirbank’s headquarters.
“We would like to confirm that HSBC remains totally committed to its business in Turkey,” Mr. Green said. “This is an important country for our Group and one we have served for over a decade. There is absolutely no question of HSBC withdrawing from Turkey.”
The attacks came five days after two suicide bombers detonated explosives outside two synagogues in Istanbul on Saturday, killing 25 people. In telephone calls to the state-run Anatolia news agency, al-Qaeda and a Turkish group known as the Great Islamic Eastern Raiders Front both claimed they carried out Thursday’s attacks.
