During a prolonged shootout with police on Tuesday near a high-rise building housing the Israeli consulate in Istanbul, one attacker was killed and two others wounded, according to authorities and eyewitnesses, Reuters reports, writes UNN.
Details
Police drew their weapons and took cover as shots rang out for at least 10 minutes near a permanent checkpoint at the glass skyscrapers in the heart of Turkey's financial district. One person was seen covered in blood.
Video footage obtained by Reuters shows a suspected attacker in a dark T-shirt and with a backpack moving between parked white police and security buses and firing an automatic rifle and a pistol. One body lay in the street, the publication writes.
According to Turkish and Israeli authorities, no Israeli employees were in the consulate, which occupies a floor in the glass skyscraper, at the time of the attack.
US Ambassador stated that the consulate was the target of the attack
Three attackers were linked to an organization that "exploits religion," said the country's Interior Minister Mustafa Çiftçi, without naming it. Two of them were brothers, and they arrived in a rented car from the city of Izmit, he added.
Although Turkish authorities did not report the attackers' motives, Tom Barrack, the US Ambassador to Turkey, stated on X that it was an attack on the Israeli consulate and condemned it.
Israeli diplomats left the consulate shortly after the start of the war between Hamas and Israel in late 2023, a conflict that sparked widespread pro-Palestinian protests outside the consulate and across the country, as well as a deep cooling of Turkish-Israeli diplomatic relations.
Two police officers sustained minor injuries in the attack, Istanbul Governor Davut Gül told reporters at the scene of the shootout, which occurred near a major highway shortly after noon.
Addition
Turkey, a fierce critic of Israel's military operations in Gaza, recalled its ambassador from Israel in November 2023, and diplomatic relations have been effectively frozen since then.
At the same time that year, Israeli diplomats left Turkey due to security concerns, including protests. Since then, heavily armed police have remained in a wide area around the consulate.
Militant violence in Turkey has largely subsided in recent years after an outbreak of violence in 2015-2016, when Islamic, Kurdish, and left-wing militants carried out attacks amid the aftermath of the Syrian civil war.
The last incident occurred late last year, when three Turkish police officers and six Islamic State militants were killed in a shootout in the city of Yalova in northwestern Turkey during raids on militant cells believed to be planning attacks for Christmas and New Year.