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Islamic State claims attack
Police detain 8 people as search for gunman continues
Terror group takes responsibility for gunman’s deadly rampage in Turkish nightclub on New Year’s.
ISTANBUL — The Islamic State group claimed responsibility Monday for the New Year’s attack that left 39 people dead at an upscale nightclub in Istanbul, and Turkish television stations broadcast video of a man believed to be the attacker.
In one video, apparently made by the suspected attacker, the man is walking around Istanbul’s Taksim Square area. In another video, captured by a security camera, he is shown waiting at the window of a currency exchange in central Istanbul.
Authorities said they have obtained fingerprints of the suspected gunman and have launched a massive manhunt.
Local media, citing unidentified officials, said the attacker was believed to be a Kyrgyz or Uzbek national. The Kyrgyz Foreign Ministry said it was looking into the reports.
Eight people have been detained by police in Istanbul in connection with the attack, but the shooter was not among them.
Islamic State, also known as ISIS, said Christian revelers were targeted in response to Turkish military operations in northern Syria, but most of the dead were foreign tourists from Muslim countries.
According to survivors, the attacker appears to have been combat trained.
“He was shooting randomly but aiming for their upper bodies. He didn’t want to just injure them,” said Mehmet Yilan, 36, a barman at the Reina nightclub.
Several witnesses said they played dead. “When he shot me I didn’t move — I just let him shoot me,” William Jacob Raak of Greenville, Del., said in an interview with NBC News. “I was shot when I was already on the ground. He was shooting people that he had already shot.”
Raak, who is believed to be the only American wounded in the attack, said he was shot in the hip.
The shooter, according to Turkish investigators, carried spare cartridges of ammunition in a backpack, and reloaded his long-barreled gun at least six times. Over the course of a sevenminute rampage, he fired on partygoers on the ground and upper levels of the club, as well as into the icy waters of the Bosporus, into which some of the clubgoers had jumped to escape.
He escaped after changing clothes in the club’s kitchen and leaving amid the confusion. He took a taxi north along the Bosporus, but disembarked soon after when he told the driver he had no cash.
The dead included 11 Turkish citizens, including Fatih Cakmak, a security guard who survived a bombing at a nearby soccer stadium last month that killed 46.
But most of the dead were foreigners from Middle Eastern countries, including seven from Saudi Arabia; three each from Lebanon and Iraq; and two each from Tunisia, Morocco and Jordan. The others were from India, Germany, Brussels, Kuwait, Canada, Israel, Syria and Russia.
“I just want to know who they think they are?” Mahiar Assaf, a Jordanian whose brother Nawras was killed in the attack, told Al Arabiya television. “God is the only one who could put himself in this position to take anyone’s life.”
In its statement released through its Amaq news agency, Islamic State said a “heroic soldier” had attacked “a polytheist celebration of the Christians.” The statement referred to Turkey — where about 99 percent of the population is Muslim — as the “protector of the cross.”
Islamic State boasts of having cells in Turkey, regularly issues propaganda in Turkish and is believed to have hundreds of Turks in its ranks. But until now, the main act of aggression it had claimed in Turkey was the March 2016 killing of a Syrian journalist and an attack on riot police in the province of Diyarbakir, which Kurdish militants also claimed.
On Monday, the Turkish military said it carried out scores of airstrikes in northern Syria, killing 22 Islamic State members.