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 A Reuters reporter saw bodies covered by flags and banners,
including those of the pro-Kurdish opposition Peoples' Democratic
Party (HDP), with bloodstains and body parts scattered on the road.
The interior ministry said 30 people were killed and 126 wounded.
Witnesses said the two explosions happened seconds apart shortly
after 1000 am as crowds gathered for a planned march to protest over
a conflict between Turkish security forces and Kurdish militants in
the southeast.
There were no claims of responsibility for the attack.
But the NATO member has been in a heightened state of alert since
starting a "synchronized war on terror" in July, including air
strikes against Islamic State fighters in Syria and PKK bases in
northern Iraq. It has also rounded up hundreds of suspected Kurdish
and Islamist militants at home.
Footage screened by broadcaster CNN Turk showed a line of young men
and women holding hands and dancing, and then flinching as a large
explosion flashed behind them, where people were gathered carrying
HDP and leftist party banners.
 "We are faced with a very big massacre, a vicious, barbarous
attack," HDP leader Selahattin Demirtas told reporters.
He drew a parallel with the bombing of an HDP rally in the
southeastern city of Diyarbakir on the eve of the last election in
June and a suicide bombing blamed on Islamic State in the town of
Suruc near the Syrian border in July, which killed 33 mostly young
pro-Kurdish activists.
Authorities were investigating claims Saturday's attacks were
carried out by suicide bombers, two government officials told
Reuters. Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu canceled his next three days
of election campaigning and was due to hold an emergency meeting
with the heads of the police and intelligence agencies and other
senior officials, his office said.
The renewed conflict in the southeast has raised questions over how
Turkey can hold a free and fair election in violence-hit areas but
the government has so far insisted that the vote will go ahead.
President Tayyip Erdogan canceled his engagements to consult with
senior security and government officials, while Demirtas and the
leader of the main opposition CHP, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, also canceled
their programs for Saturday.
"We're ready to come together and work sincerely to finish terror,"
Kilicdaroglu, whose party is seen as a potential coalition partner
for the ruling AK Party after the Nov. 1 election, told reporters in
comments broadcast live.
Violence between the state and Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK)
militants has flared since July, when Turkey launched air strikes on
militant camps in response to what it said were rising attacks on
the security forces in the predominantly Kurdish southeast. Hundreds
have since died.
Those involved in the march tended to the wounded lying on the
ground, as hundreds of stunned people wandered around the streets.
Bodies lay in two circles around 20 meters apart where the
explosions appeared to have taken place.
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"This is a ruthless and barbaric attack on peaceful demonstrators,"
Council of Europe Secretary General Thorbjorn Jagland said in a
statement. "Freedom of assembly and freedom of expression are
fundamental pillars of democracy."
CEASEFIRE HAD BEEN EXPECTED
The attacks come three weeks ahead of an election at which the
ruling AK Party is trying to claw back its majority, and at a time
of multiple security threats, not only in the southeast but also
from Islamic State militants in neighboring Syria and home-grown
leftist militants.
In June polls, the AKP lost the overall majority it had held since
2002, partly because of the electoral success of a pro-Kurdish
political party, the HDP, which party founder Erdogan accuses of
links to the PKK. The HDP denies the accusation.
Saturday's attacks came as hopes mounted that the PKK was about to
announce a unilateral ceasefire.
Writing in a Kurdish newspaper this week, senior PKK figure Bese
Hozat hinted at a cessation of hostilities as a way of bolstering
the chances of the HDP in the upcoming election.
But Deputy Prime Minister Yalcin Akdogan, who is in charge of the
Kurdish dossier for the government, on Thursday dismissed any such
move as an electoral gambit, pouring cold water on hopes of an
imminent end to the violence.
Designated a terrorist group by Turkey, the United States and the
European Union, the PKK launched a separatist insurgency in 1984 in
which more than 40,000 people have been killed.
The state launched peace talks with the PKK's jailed leader Abdullah
Ocalan in 2012 and the latest in a series of ceasefires had been
holding until the violence flared again in July.
(Additional reporting by Daren Butler and Asli Kandemir in Istanbul,
Gulsen Solaker in Ankara; Writing by Nick Tattersall; Editing by
Ralph Boulton)
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