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Version 6 Version 7
Turkey Says It Has Identified Gunman in Istanbul Nightclub Attack In Turkey, U.S. Hand Is Seen in Nearly Every Crisis
(about 7 hours later)
ISTANBUL — The Turkish authorities said on Wednesday that they had identified the fugitive gunman who went on a deadly rampage at an upscale Istanbul nightclub in the early hours of New Year’s Day, although they did not release his name. ISTANBUL — Turkish officials accused the United States of abetting a failed coup last summer. When the Russian ambassador to Turkey was assassinated last month, the Turkish press said the United States was behind the attack.
“The identity of the person responsible for the Istanbul attack has been established,” the Turkish foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, told the state-run news agency Anadolu, which also reported that the police had detained 20 people, believed to be Islamic State militants, in connection with the assault. And once again, after a gunman walked into an Istanbul nightclub early on New Year’s Day and killed dozens, the pro-government news media pointed a finger at the United States.
Some of those who were arrested, in the western Turkish province of Izmir, are thought to have lived with the attacker in the central city of Konya, Anadolu reported, adding that night vision equipment, a sniper scope, an ammunition belt and other military equipment had been found during police raids. “America Chief Suspect,” one headline blared after the attack. On Twitter, a Turkish lawmaker, referring to the name of the nightclub, wrote: “Whoever the triggerman is, Reina attack is an act of CIA. Period.”
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in his first public remarks since the attack, told an audience in Ankara, the capital, that the assault that left 39 people dead was a failed attempt to divide the Turkish people and to harm the country’s economy. Turkey has been confronted with a cascade of crises that seem to have only accelerated as the Syrian civil war has spilled across the border. But the events have not pushed Turkey closer to its NATO allies. Conversely, they have drifted further apart as the nation lashes out at Washington and moves closer to Moscow, working with the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, to secure a cease-fire in Syria.
“I am saying one more time, in Turkey, no one’s lifestyle is under systematic threat,” Mr. Erdogan said. “We will never allow it. During our 14-year rule, we have never allowed it.” One story in the Turkish press, based on a routine travel warning issued by the American Embassy in Turkey, was that the United States had advance knowledge of the nightclub attack, which the Islamic State later claimed responsibility for. Another suggested that stun grenades used by the gunman had come from stocks held by the American military. Still another claimed the assault was a plot by the United States to sow divisions in Turkey between the secular and the religious.
Mr. Erdogan added that, “As the president of all of 79 million citizens, it is my duty to protect everyone’s rights, law and spaces of freedom.” Nonetheless, the president has engaged in a widespread crackdown — most notably after a failed coup in July — against political opponents, journalists and Kurdish groups. Rather than bringing the United States and Turkey together in the common fight against terrorism, the nightclub attack, even with the gunman still on the run, appears to have only accelerated Turkey’s shift away from the West, at a time when its democracy is eroding amid a growing crackdown on civil society.
Parliament voted overnight to extend emergency rule by three months, as the country continues a vast purge of people it says have ties to the coup attempt. Many are supporters of Fethullah Gulen, a Pennsylvania-based preacher and opponent of Mr. Erdogan. All of this is a reflection, many critics say, of what they call the paranoia and authoritarianism of Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose leadership has so deeply divided the country that, instead of unifying to confront terrorism, Turkish society is fracturing further with each attack.
The emergency powers were first put in place after the coup attempt and were extended in October. More than 40,000 people have been jailed in connection with the coup plot. The West, symbolized by the United States, is the perennial boogeyman.
The White House said in a statement on Wednesday that President Obama had expressed condolences over the attack in a telephone call with Mr. Erdogan, adding that the United States and Turkey must stand united to defeat terrorism and praising Ankara for its efforts to establish a cease-fire in Syria. While seeming to pile on the Obama administration in its waning days — by accusing it of supporting Turkey’s enemies, including the Islamic State; Kurdish militants; and supporters of an outlawed Muslim cleric, Fethullah Gulen, whom Mr. Erdogan blamed for directing the coup — Turkish officials are also telegraphing something else: that they are willing to open the door and improve relations with the United States once President-elect Donald J. Trump takes office.
Although no additional details about the gunman were released, the fact that the statement about his identity came from Mr. Cavusoglu rather than from the Interior Ministry or from the deputy prime minister was potentially significant: It may have been a signal that the authorities believe the attack was committed by a foreigner rather than by a Turk. “Our expectation from the new administration is to end this shame,” Turkey’s prime minister, Binali Yildirim, said this week while accusing the United States of providing weapons to Kurdish militants in Syria who are fighting the Islamic State, but are also an enemy of Turkey. “We are not holding the new administration responsible for this,” Mr. Yildirim said. “Because this is the work of the Obama administration.”
On Tuesday, Kyrgyzstan said it had released a citizen who had been taken in for questioning in connection with the attack, according to local news reports. The Kyrgyz National News Agency identified the man as Yahya Mashrapov, 28. Meanwhile, the nightclub assailant is on the loose.
He told the authorities that he had spent two days in Istanbul for business and had left Turkey on Tuesday after being questioned by the police, according to Agence France-Presse. Intelligence officials in Kyrgyzstan said they were in contact with their Turkish counterparts, the news agency reported. The Turkish authorities said on Wednesday that they had identified the killer, but refused to release any other details, although photographs of the man, from surveillance cameras, have been released. Also, a video surfaced that appeared to show the assailant recording himself in Istanbul’s Taksim Square.
The Turkish announcement about having identified the gunman came days after the authorities released images of the suspect taken by security cameras at the Reina nightclub. Video also surfaced showing what appeared to be the suspect recording himself as he walked through Taksim Square in Istanbul. A senior United States official, who has been briefed on the investigation and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential details, said the Turks had recovered the video from a raid on a house in Istanbul. The official said the Turks now believed the killer was from Uzbekistan, not Kyrgyzstan, as many reports this week had first suggested.
The security camera images showed a dark-haired, cleanshaven man in a dark winter coat, and a government spokesman said at the time that investigators were close to identifying him. The official expressed alarm at the growing anti-Americanism in Turkey, which seems to accumulate after each crisis here, and said it put the lives of Americans in the country in jeopardy.
The Islamic State rarely claims responsibility for attacks in Turkey, but it did so in this case, declaring in a statement that the assault had been carried out by a “hero soldier” against a “famous nightclub, where Christians celebrated their pagan holiday.” The chaotic investigation has added to the anxiety on Istanbul’s streets, with vehicle checkpoints, night raids on houses and low-flying helicopters.
The attack came just hours after the end of a tumultuous year for Turkey, which included several terrorist attacks, the failed coup and the assassination of the Russian ambassador to the country. “There is significant fear in ordinary people,” said Aydin Engin, a columnist at the daily newspaper Cumhuriyet, who was detained last year as part of the government’s crackdown on the news media. “Fear prevails when it comes to going to an entertainment place, being in a crowd, going to a shopping mall, getting on the metro.”
With each passing day, public life descends deeper into what many Turks concede is a mix of darkness and seeming absurdity, with growing fears of violence and expressions of xenophobia set next to repressions on civic life.
In the days before and after the nightclub massacre on the shores of the Bosporus, nationalists staged a mock execution of Santa Claus in the name of defending Islam; a reporter for The Wall Street Journal was detained, strip searched and placed in solitary confinement — for, according to the newspaper’s account, “violating a government ban on publication of images from an Islamic State video”; and a well-known fashion designer was beaten up at the Istanbul airport and arrested for his social media posts.
“In a way, it’s basically a breakdown of order,” said Soli Ozel, a Turkish columnist and academic, seeking to explain the tumult in society. “Everyone feels entitled to do whatever they want to do and how they want to do it.”
Tugrul Eryilmaz, another longtime Turkish journalist, recalled the country’s military coup in 1980 and the crackdown on civil society that followed, and said, “I have never been in such a situation like today.”
He brought up the Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel, who was known for surreal and absurd themes. “I feel like I am in his movies,” he said.
While Turkey faces a growing terror threat, the country is also largely at war with itself, with deep divisions along many lines — religion, class, ethnicity — that make unity difficult even in a time of crisis. Perhaps the greatest source of division is between supporters of Mr. Erdogan, about half the country, and opponents who assert that he has become too powerful.
“Turkey is so deeply polarized around the powerful persona of Erdogan that, instead of asking why terror attacks are happening and how they can be stopped, the pro- and anti-Erdogan blocks in the country are blaming each other,” said Soner Cagaptay, a specialist on Turkey at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “This is why I am deeply worried about Turkey and the country’s ability to stymie further terror attacks.”
Parliament voted overnight to extend by three months the state of emergency that went into effect last summer after the failed coup. The emergency grants Mr. Erdogan’s government extraordinary powers to detain perceived opponents and hold them in pretrial detention. Tens of thousands of people have either been arrested or been purged from their jobs, on suspicion of having links to Mr. Gulen, who lives in exile in Pennsylvania.
Mr. Erdogan on Wednesday made his first public remarks since the attack on Sunday morning, a striking period of silence for a man who is normally ubiquitous in the public sphere, often giving speeches daily.
Mr. Erdogan, an Islamist, rejected criticism that his government, in pushing an Islamist agenda, had deepened divisions between the secular and the pious. Many on social media, in the aftermath of the nightclub attack, noted that the Turkish government’s religious authorities had denounced New Year’s celebrations as un-Islamic.
“As the president of all 79 million citizens,” Mr. Erdogan said, “it is my duty to protect everyone’s rights, law and spaces of freedom.”
Mr. Erdogan, who spoke this week with President Obama in a condolence call, also told his audience what he believed Turkey, in facing so many terrorist attacks, was really up against: a plot by the West.
Invoking the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I and the subsequent Turkish war against Western armies and their proxies, he said, “Today Turkey is in a new struggle for independence.”