Ankara  - Turkish police continued investigations Tuesday into a bomb blast on Sunday in Istanbul that killed 17 people and injured more than 150 with officials pointing the blame at the separatist Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK), charges the PKK have denied.

As the families of the dead continued funeral preparations police were seeking a man in a black shirt who was captured by a mobile phone camera running down the street in Istanbul suburb of Gungoren just seconds before the second blast hit, Yenisafak newspaper reported on Tuesday.

A first small bomb which had been placed in a rubbish bin on a crowded pedestrian street in the working class suburb exploded at around 9:45 pm (1645 GMT) Sunday night and was followed by a much larger blast around 10 to 12 minutes later and around 50 metres down the street.

Yenisafak reported that police had raided a number of houses around the city in their search for the attackers and that the second bomb was made of TNT explosives.

Turkish newspapers on Tuesday concentrated on allegations that the PKK was behind the blast, quoting Istanbul governor Muammer Guler who said the attack seemed linked to "the separatist organization" and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan who said the attack could be a reprisal for continued attacks on the PKK in the south-east and air strikes on PKK positions in northern Iraq.

The PKK on Monday denied involvement, saying instead that the attacks could be linked to fiercely secularist nationalists in the so-called Ergenekon group who have allegedly been behind organized attacks and plotted assassinations of prominent Turks with the aim of destabilizing Erdogan's government.

Interior Minister Besir Atalay is expected to address parliament on either Tuesday or Wednesday to give a detailed report on the investigations. (dpa)