ISTANBUL – Attention focused Friday on whether a Chechen extremist known to be a top lieutenant in the Islamic State group was involved in the suicide attacks that killed 44 people at Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport.
Advertisement
Turkish media reported that a man nicknamed “Akhmed One-Arm” was behind the attack. Sabah newspaper, which is close to the government, said authorities had launched a manhunt to capture him.
That is until a year ago, when global pressure forced Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to allow Western forces to use an air base to stage a bombing campaign of the Islamic State.
And despite being the de-facto crossroads of ISIS militants, Turkey was for a long time untouched by the violence of the radical terrorist group.
“They have no connection to Islam”.
BERIVAN TANRIVERDI, Protestor (through translator): We think we are surviving by chance, because the government supports ISIS, and innocent people are killed as a result.
“He directly commands 130 militants and calls on Muslims to join the armed fight against the official authorities in Syrian Arab Republic, Iraq, and other countries with the aim of establishing a caliphate”, according to the U.N. Security Council’s description of Chatayev, adding that the terrorist appeared in a 2014 video encouraging Muslims to join ISIS. The attackers were spotted soon after they emerged from a taxi outside the airport; at least two were shot by security forces, and only one made it inside the global terminal.
Turkish police have rounded up 13 suspects over triple suicide bombings at Istanbul’s worldwide airport that killed 43 people, the state-run Anadolu news agency reported.
Since the first Russian-Chechen war in the mid-1990s, Istanbul has been home to thousands of Chechen refugees, with reports suggesting that Chechen fighters have used the Turkish metropolis as a base to recruit fighters and to recuperate from injuries after being wounded in Syria. Tarkhan Batirashvili, who took the nom de guerre Omar al Shishani, or Omar the Chechen, an ethnic Chechen from the former Soviet republic of Georgia, rose to the rank of a senior IS commander before he died of wounds suffered in a US airstrike in Syria earlier this year.
On Thursday, Western news agencies, quoting a senior Turkish official, reported that the three attackers in Istanbul were citizens of Russia, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.
Swedish authorities said Chatayev was convicted of weapons smuggling in 2008.
Fathi Bayoudh, a Tunisian military doctor and head of a pediatrics unit at a hospital in the country’s capital, had traveled to Turkey about two months ago to retrieve his son, Anouar, from Syria, a family friend confirmed to NBC News.
The documents show that he denied knowing about the guns hidden in a spare wheel in the trunk. A local paper said he was freed from prison in January 2009. IS has repeatedly threatened Turkey in its propaganda, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation member has blamed IS for several major bombings in the past year in both Ankara and Istanbul.
Turkish security forces have killed the mastermind behind a suicide bombing in which 29 people died in February, according to an official.
Mehmet Sirin Kaya was shot in a counter-terrorism operations in Lice, in the Diyarbakir province, officials said.
“Nothing will change”, he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Though many fearful tourists cancelled trips to Turkey, some foreigners emphasized that attacks would not keep them away from Istanbul.
Advertisement
The apology is part of Ankara’s attempt at rapprochement with Russian Federation aimed at removing sanctions that have hit Turkey’s tourism, agricultural, construction and trade sectors.
