At least 35 killed, 40 wounded in Istanbul nightclub ‘terror attack’

Initial reports from NTV claimed as many as 20 or 30 people may have been wounded in the attack.

“No Kurdish forces have anything to do with this attack”, it said in a statement.

“We are aware that these attacks carried out by different terrorist organizations targeting our citizens are not independent from incidents happening in our region”, he said.

Dogan said there were at least 700 visitors gathered in the high-end club.

Turkish authorities are still searching for the gunman, who killed a police officer guarding the Reina nightclub before going on a shooting rampage with a rapid-fire rifle, leaving 39 dead, but the state news media reported that eight suspects had been detained in connection with the attack.

“I vehemently condemn the terror attack in Istanbul’s Ortakoy neighbourhood in the first hours of 2017”, Erdogan said in a written statement Sunday.

Many revellers jumped into the water in panic. The gunman arrived by taxi before rushing through the entrance with a long-barrelled gun he had taken from the boot of the vehicle.

No-one has yet claimed responsibility for the bloodshed.

Family Minister Fatma Betul Sayan Kaya indicated there were many Arabs among the wounded.

Foreigners accounted for 24, or almost two-thirds of the attack’s victims, Turkey’s state-run news agency reported.

United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres condemned late Sunday the terror attack at an Istanbul nightclub that killed 39 people and injured 69 others. We thought that there were several of them because it just didn’t stop. “Gunshots rang out”, witness Sefa Boydas, a professional footballer, told AFP. “When I was walking, people were walking on top of people”.

White House official Ned Price said the attack on “innocent revellers” celebrating New Year’s shows the attackers’ savagery.

Some who support Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government appropriated the hashtag by using it to call out his opponents for celebrating the attack as a win against his policies.

The attacker fired randomly at people in an assault lasting seven minutes, starting with a security guard and a travel agent near the entrance.

Turkey’s Prime Minister has denied that the Istanbul nightclub gunman wore a Father Christmas outfit during the attack. “Our common duty is to combat terrorists’ aggression”, Putin said.