Turkish police have arrested 46 people on suspicion of links to al-Qaeda, the state-run Anatolian news agency said today.
It said 25 people had been held in the central Turkish province of Konya. A further 21 people had been arrested in raids in the western provinces of Istanbul, Izmir and Kocaeli, and in the southeastern province of Mardin.
Police in secular Turkey, which has a mainly Muslim population, have carried out a series of operations against suspected Islamic guerrillas since November 2003 suicide bombings by al-Qaeda militants.
Those attacks in Istanbul targeted two synagogues, the British consulate and the local headquarters of HSBC Bank, killing more than 60 people.
Last Friday, a Turkish court jailed seven Islamist militants for being part of an armed gang that plotted to kill President Bush during a 2004 Nato summit in Istanbul.
The seven men were members of Ansar al-Islam, a radical group believed to have links to al-Qaeda.