Istanbul airport attack suspects on trial over terror

ISTANBUL: Forty-six suspects – one third of them Russian nationals – went on trial in connection with last year’s triple suicide bombing of Istanbul’s main airport, an attack that killed 45 people.

They are accused of ‘attempting to destroy the constitutional order’ and ‘murder’, state-run Anadolu news agency reported.

They are also charged with “membership of an armed terror group” and “forming and running a terror group,” said the indictment.

Anadolu said 42 of the accused, who had been under arrest, appeared in court at Silivri, outside Istanbul, in a hearing due to last four days.

Sixteen of the accused are Russian nationals and the others are Chechen, Tunisian, Egyptian, Algerian, Syrian and Turkish.

Those killed in the suicide bombings at Ataturk Airport on June 28, 2016, included 19 foreigners and it was one of the worst attacks to rock Turkey’s biggest city that year.

No group has claimed responsibility for the attack but Turkey says the Islamic State group was behind the airport blasts. The court indictment also said IS “targeted the Turkish republic.”

Two of the three assailants in the massacre were identified as Rakim Bulgarov and Vadim Osmanov, according to court papers which did not identify the third attacker.

They are believed to be from Russia, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, and entered Turkey from Syria’s Raqa, IS’s then defacto capital, a month before the airport atrocities. — AFP