24 held over Istanbul attack

Alleged IS mastermind had been arrested before, but released due to ‘refugee status’

ISTANBUL: Turkish investigators are probing whether a notorious Chechen who is an Islamic State (IS) leader masterminded the attack on this city’s main airport this week.

Yesterday Turkish police detained 11 foreigners suspected of belonging to an IS cell linked to the attack.

Forty- four people were killed in Tuesday’s bombings and shootings, which targeted one of the world’s busiest airports. The three suspected attackers were Russian, Uzbek and Kyrgyz nationals, a Turkish government official said.

The pro-government Yeni Safak newspaper said the organiser of the attack, the bloodiest in a series of suicide bombings in Nato-member Turkey this year, was suspected to be a man of Chechen origin called Akhmed Chatayev.

Chatayev was identified on a UN sanctions list as a leader in IS responsible for training Russian-speaking militants.

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. A year later he was wounded and captured in Georgia but again released.

In 2012 Georgian officials said Chatayev had been wounded in a special forces operation against an unidentified group in the remote Lopota Gorge near the border with Dagestan.

The group was believed to be made up of Russian Islamist insurgents fighting against Moscow’s rule in the North Caucasus.

Chatayev, whose foot was later amputated due to his injuries, was arrested on charges of weapons possession. He denied this and said he had been sent to the gorge as a negotiator at the request of Georgian officials.

He was released on the orders of a Georgian court later that year and cleared of all charges in January 2013. “He was released lawfully, whether it was a mistake or not,” former Georgian interior minister Vakhtang Gomelauri said this year.

In 2011 he was detained by Bulgarian police at the country’s border with Turkey as Russia wanted him for “participation in an armed group and for the recruitment of persons for terrorism and for financing terrorism”, a Bulgarian judge told Bulgarian national radio yesterday.

However, the Bulgarian court refused to extradite him, saying his refugee status, which had been granted to him in Austria in 2003, remained valid in all countries that are signatories to the Geneva Con- vention, which includes Bulgaria.

Yesterday’s dawn arrests by counter- terror police in the European side of Istanbul brought to 24 the number of people detained in the investigation, state- run Anadolu Agency said. A police spokesman could not confirm the report.

Turkish officials have not given many details beyond confirming the attackers’ nationalities. They previously said forensic teams were struggling to identify the suicide bombers from their limited remains.

Yeni Safak said the Russian bomber was from Dagestan, which borders Chechnya where Moscow has led two wars against separatists and Islamist militants since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

Turkey’s Hurriyet newspaper named the Russian bomber as Osman Vadinov and said he had come from Raqqa, the heart of IS-controlled territory in Syria. The Russian interior ministry said it was checking information about Vadinov. – Reuters