Turkish security forces thwarted what they called a terrorist attack on the national Police Headquarters on Sunday in the capital, Ankara, hours before Parliament was scheduled to reconvene nearby.
Ali Yerlikaya, the interior minister, said that two assailants in a small commercial vehicle carried out a bomb attack on the gate to the headquarters. One blew himself up, and the other was killed in clashes with the police, he said in a post on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. Two officers were lightly wounded.
It was not immediately clear who the attackers were, or if they belonged to a larger organization. Turkey has faced regular attacks in the past from Kurdish separatists, members of the Islamic State and other groups. But in recent years, such episodes have become rare and generally small.
Without suggesting who the attackers might have been, Mr. Yerlikaya said Turkey would maintain its security. “Our relentless struggle will continue until the last terrorist is neutralized,” he wrote.
The blast resonated in Ankara, where residents posted on social media that they had heard gunfire. The security forces quickly cordoned off the blast site and kept journalists away.
The attack took place near key government buildings. The Police Headquarters is in the same building as the Interior Ministry, which oversees domestic security.
The Parliament building is nearby and was scheduled to reopen on Sunday afternoon after its summer recess with a speech by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It was not immediately clear if the attack was connected to Parliament’s resumption, and it appeared that the opening would proceed as planned.
NTV, a Turkish broadcaster, said the Parliament building was closed while security forces searched for bombs. It shared a still image from an unverified surveillance video that purported to capture the attack and was widely shared on social media. The video showed a van stopping on the street outside the gate to the police compound and two men with weapons getting out. One ran toward the gate and then disappeared in a large cloud of smoke apparently caused by an explosion.
The Interior Ministry said the second assailant was also wearing a bomb, which the police detonated in a controlled manner after killing the attacker.
The public prosecutor’s office in Ankara opened an investigation into the attack, Turkey’s justice minister, Yilmaz Tunc, wrote on X.
The attack was the first in Ankara in a number of years. Last November, a bombing that the government accused Kurdish militants of orchestrating killed six people and wounded dozens of others on a busy pedestrian street in Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city.