He registered as a refugee, made his way to Istanbul, and blew up eleven people for the Islamic State. Solution: bring in hundreds of thousands more refugees. What could possibly go wrong?
“Face of a killer: Turkish police release first mugshot of the Istanbul ISIS bomber who registered as a refugee one week before he blew himself up, killing 11,” by Simon Tomlinson, Sara Malm and Imogen Calderwood, Mailonline, January 13, 2016:
This is the face of the Istanbul suicide bomber who blew himself up in Sultanahmet square near the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia, killing 11 tourists and injuring 14.
Nabil Fadli, a 28-year-old ISIS member, had recently entered the country from Syria and registered as a refugee with Turkish immigration authorities in Istanbul just one week before the attack.
CCTV footage released previously showed only the back of Fadli’s head as he passed through the immigration office.
Flowers and candles marked the site of the suicide bombing, as Syrians living in the Turkish city gathered to pay their respects to the dead and injured this evening.
Earlier today, a Turkish tour guide revealed how she spotted Fadli ‘pulling the pin’ in Sultanahmet square, and shouted at the crowd of tourists to run, moments before the massive blast.
Sibel Şatıroğlu, who was wounded in the explosion, had been guiding a group of some 25 people when she saw Fadli before he detonated the bomb which killed 10 German tourists and one Peruvian, and injured 14, one who later died in hospital.
‘I was with a group of 20-25 people near the Obelisk. I heard a trigger sound. I realised it wasn’t a normal sound and I looked around me,’ Ms Satiroglu, who suffered a leg wound and hearing loss in the blast, told police according to WorldBulletin.
‘Amongst our group I noticed someone who appeared to be Turkish looking in our German group. He had a cleanshave face, with a small beard. I saw him pull the pin trigger, and I screamed for everyone to run. We started running as the bomb exploded’.
Witnesses say that there could have been many more deaths, had it not been for Ms Şatıroğl shouting ‘Lauft weg!'(run away) to the large group of German tourists standing in the square.
Fadli has been confirmed as carrying out the blast in the name of ISIS, and had registered with Turkish immigration authorities but was not on any list of known militant suspects, Turkey’s interior minister said on Wednesday.
Asked about a report in the Turkish media that the bomber had registered at an immigration office in Istanbul a week ago, Interior Minister Efkan Ala confirmed that the man’s fingerprints were on record with the Turkish authorities.
‘Your assessment that his fingerprints were taken and there is a record of him is correct. But he was not on the wanted individuals list. And neither is he on the target individuals list sent to us by other countries,’ Ala told a joint news conference with his German counterpart Thomas de Maiziere.
Meanwhile, Turkish authorities have detained three Russian men with links to ISIS in connection with the massive explosion in the Sultanahmet neighbourhood, an area home to some of Istanbul’s most popular tourist attractions.
At least 10 German travellers and one man from Peru were killed in the blast. Six Germans, one Norwegian and a Peruvian were also wounded in the blast, with one of the German nationals later dying in hospital.
Russia’s Consulate General in the Mediterranean city of Antalya has today confirmed that three Russians had been detained over suspected connection to ISIS.
Police also seized documents and CDs during a search of the premises where the suspects were staying, Turkey’s Dogan News Agency said. It was not immediately clear when the detentions occurred….