ISIL behind Istanbul attack
Canadian mother of two among 39 people killed in nightclub shooting
ISTANBUL — The Islamic State group claimed responsibility Monday for a mass shooting at an Istanbul nightclub New Year’s Eve that killed 39 people, including the young mother of two children from the Toronto area.
Media reports identified the victim from Milton as Alaa Al-Muhandis.
Al-Muhandis’s brother, Mohammad, told CBC he received a call from her husband on Monday. “He told me that she passed away. I don’t know even know how to tell my mom,” he told the broadcaster.
ISIL said the New Year’s Eve revellers were targeted in response to Turkish military operations against the Islamic State in northern Syria. The claim came after an ISIL propaganda video urging attacks on Turkey, which is home to an airbase used in the U.S.-led effort against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.
Nearly two-thirds of the dead at the upscale club, which is frequented by local celebrities, were foreigners, Turkey’s Anadolu Agency said. Many of them hailed from the Middle East.
The nightclub assailant, armed with a long-barrelled weapon, killed a policeman and a civilian early Sunday outside the Reina club before entering and firing at some of the estimated 600 people inside.
ISIL said the attacker was a “soldier of the caliphate” who struck to “let infidel Turkey know that the blood of Muslims that is being shed by its airstrikes and artillery shelling will turn into fire on its territories.”
Early Turkish media reports suggested the gunman was probably from either Uzbekistan or Kyrgyzstan and may have been part of the same cell that staged a June 28 attack at Ataturk Airport in Istanbul that killed more than 40.
Authorities had obtained the gunman’s fingerprints and were close to identifying him, Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus said Monday after a weekly cabinet meeting. He confirmed eight people had been detained in connection to the massacre.
By attacking as the nation was celebrating the new year, the group indicated that it intends to continue being a “scourge” against Turkey in 2017, Kurtulmus said.
Ghada Saad, a friend of Alaa Al-Muhandis, described the mother of two young children to the Globe and Mail as “a fashionable woman, full of life . ... Every time you (saw) her it was a new style.”
Saad said Al-Muhandis launched her own event-planning business, Looloo’s Arrangements, after the birth of her second child a few years ago. “She was looking for a new start,” she told the Globe. “We used to call her Looloo.”
Haber Turk television and other media said police, acting on a tip, raided an apartment in Istanbul’s Zeytinburnu district late Monday in connection to the nightclub attack. But Associated Press journalists at the scene witnessed police leaving the apartment without making any arrests.