One detained over Syrian murders in Turkey
Turkish police have detained a suspect in connection with the murders of a Syrian opposition activist and her journalist daughter, the private Dogan news agency reported yesterday.
Aroubeh Barakat and her 22-year-old daughter Halla Barakat were found dead in their Istanbul apartment last week.
The police investigation reportedly concluded they had been stabbed to death, with unconfirmed reports of their throats being cut with the bodies lying undetected for up to three days.
The arrest of Ahmet Barakat, believed to be a relative of the victims, followed analysis of hundreds of hours of security camera footage, according to Dogan.
Police captured him in the northwestern province of Bursa, according to the report, following several raids in the province.
The suspect will be taken to Istanbul for questioning, Dogan reported.
Since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011, Turkey, according to the government figures, has become home to 3.2 million Syrian refugees, many of them opponents of the regime of President Bashar Al Assad. Halla Barakat had been working for a website called Orient News and had previously worked for Turkish state broadcaster TRT. vernight air strikes killed 28 people, including four children, in a village in rebel-held Idlib province, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said yesterday.
Rescue workers have said Syria and Russia have killed scores of civilians in air strikes that began after insurgents launched an offensive against government-held areas in the north west of the country on September 19.
The Russian and Syrian militaries say they only target militants and deny killing civilians.
Dominated by the militant group formerly known as Al Nusra Front, the Idlib region had seen a six-month lull in air strikes until the latest escalation.
However, the overnight air strike targeted the village of Armanaz a few kilometres from the Turkish border. The Syrian Civil Defence, a rescue service operating in rebel-held areas, put the preliminary death toll at 26.
Turkey said last week that recent Russian bombing in Idlib had killed civilians and moderate Syrian rebels, saying this violated an agreement concluded with Iran and Russia.
Turkey, Iran and Russia agreed to create a “de-escalation” zone in Idlib. Under the agreement, Turkey will deploy troops in Idlib, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has said.
Meanwhile, US-led air strikes in Iraq and Syria have killed another 50 civilians, the international coalition against Daesh announced on Friday.
With the latest deaths, “at least 735 civilians have been unintentionally killed by coalition strikes,” it said in a statement, without specifying when the deaths occurred.
The US began carrying out strikes against Daesh in Iraq in August 2014, a campaign that has since been expanded to Syria and now includes dozens of countries backing counterterrorism efforts.