A Turkish flag flies on half-staff in Taksim Square in Istanbul, Turkey.

Turkish police have arrested in Ankara two suspected suicide bombers linked to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) militant group who were plotting an attack on New Year’s Eve in the capital, a Turkish official told AFP on Wednesday.

“They are suspected of being affiliated with ISIS and were planning an attack on the New Year in Ankara,” the official said, asking not to be named.

Counter-terror police arrested the two people in the Mamak district in the outskirts of the capital, the private NTV television reported.

Turkey is on high security alert after 103 people were killed on October 10 when two suicide bombers ripped through a crowd of peace activists in Ankara, the worst attack in modern Turkey’s history.

That attack was blamed on ISIS, like two other deadly strikes in the country’s Kurdish-dominated southeast earlier in the summer.

Turkish authorities have over the past months cracked down on the group’s so-called “sleeper cells” throughout the country.

The arrests come a month after authorities foiled another plot to stage a major attack in Istanbul on the same day as the deadly gun and suicide attacks in Paris that claimed nearly 130 lives.

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