More Arrested in Connection With Istanbul Airport Attack

Prosecutors have established the identity of two of the three airport attackers – giving their names as Rakim Bulgarov and Vadim Osmanov – and were trying to identify the third, Anadolu said.

A Turkish senior official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because government regulations did not authorize him to talk to the media, said the attackers were from Russian Federation and the Central Asian nations of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Thirteen suspects, including three foreigners, have been referred to Istanbul’s Bakirkoy Court after undergoing medical checks, according to the report.

The Tuesday attack, carried out by three suicide bombers, killed 44 people and injured almost 240 people.

A second-floor apartment in a working class Istanbul neighborhood is where the suicide bombers are believed to have lived in the weeks before the devastating attack on Turkey’s bustling global Ataturk Airport.

He was arrested in Bulgaria five years ago on a Russian extradition request but freed because he had refugee status in Austria, a Bulgarian judge said.

“People from the former Soviet Union tend to be the most … willing to die”, said CNN contributor Michael Weiss, author of “ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror”. He was added to the US list of global terrorists in 2015 and is wanted by the Russian government.

“They say they are doing this in the name of Islam”, he said. Many have fled because of restrictions on religious practices there, which, according to human rights groups have become more rigid following the rise of the Islamic State extremist group.

Several news organizations reported Ahmed Chatayev, a Dagestan native who has been linked to other terrorist attacks, was the main organizer of the airport assault, but authorities did not provide confirmation.

Mourners stand next to the body of Sondos al-Basha, a Palestinian woman who was killed in the Istanbul airport attack blamed on the Islamic State (IS) group on June 28, during her funeral in the West Bank town of Qalqilyah on July 1, 2016. The group has boasted having cells in Turkey and other nearby countries. “Their place is in hell”, Erdogan said, speaking in Istanbul after Friday prayers. “They embarked on a journey unaware, and came face to face with death”. They have previously said that forensic teams were struggling to identify the suicide bombers from their limited remains.

Haber Turk newspaper said 11 more suspects – all of them foreign nationals – were detained in a separate raid on a house in Istanbul early Friday.

Turkish authorities, who re-opened the airport within hours of the attack, said air traffic had returned to normal by Friday.

So far, 23 people who died in the attacks have been identified.

Mehmet Sirin Kaya was shot in a counter-terrorism operations in Lice, in the Diyarbakir province, officials said.

Turkey has also been plagued by ongoing Kurdish violence, with Kurdish militants staging a string of attacks and Turkey continuing a bloody crackdown in the southeast and also in northern Iraq where the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) has traditionally had bases and training camps.