Istanbul nightclub attack kills 39 in New Year carnage

January 1, 2017

Istanbul, Jan 1: Thirty-nine people, including many foreigners, were killed when a gunman reportedly dressed as Santa Claus stormed an Istanbul nightclub as revellers were celebrating the New Year, the latest carnage to rock Turkey after a bloody 2016.

Istanbul

The assailant shot dead a policeman and a civilian at the entrance to the Reina club, one of the city's most exclusive nightspots, and then went on a shooting rampage inside, Turkish officials said.

Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu said the attacker escaped and was now the target of a major manhunt, expressing hope the suspect "would be captured soon".

Soylu said in televised comments that of 21 victims who have been identified so far, 16 are foreigners and five are Turks. Another 69 people are being treated in hospital.

"The attacker - in the most brutal and merciless way - targeted innocent people who had only come here to celebrate the New Year and have fun," Istanbul governor Vasip Sahin said at the scene on the shores of the Bosphorus.

Many revellers threw themselves into the water in panic and efforts were under way to rescue them, NTV television said.

Dogan news agency said there were two gunmen dressed in Santa Claus outfits, although this has yet to be confirmed.

Television pictures showed party-goers - including men in suits and women in cocktail dresses - emerging from the nightclub in a state of shock.

Sahin said the attack began at 1:15 am today (local time), just after hundreds of revellers had seen in 2017 at the club in the Ortakoy district on the European side of the city.

"What happened today is a terror attack," he said.

Dogan reported that some witnesses claimed the assailants were "speaking Arabic" while NTV said special force police officers were still searching the club.

There has been no claim of responsibility.

The attack evoked memories of the November 2015 carnage in Paris when Islamic State jihadists went on a gun and bombing rampage on nightspots in the French capital, killing 130 people including 90 at the Bataclan concert hall.

From Sydney to Paris, Rio to London, security had been boosted over fears that the New Year festivities could present a target for violent extremists.

In Istanbul, at least 17,000 police officers were deployed and some, as is customary in Turkey, dressed themselves as Santa Claus as cover, according to television reports.

"Just as we were settling down, by the door there was a lot of dust and smoke. Gunshots rang out. When those sounds were heard, many girls fainted," professional footballer Sefa Boydas told AFP.

"They say 35 to 40 died but it's probably more because when I was walking, people were walking on top of people."

Dogan said there were at least 700 revellers at the elite club, where getting past the bouncers who seek out only the best dressed is notoriously hard.

Turkey has been hit by a wave of attacks blamed on Kurdish militants and IS jihadists and 2016 saw more attacks than any other year in the history of the country.

On December 10, 44 people were killed in a double bombing in Istanbul after a football match hosted by top side Besiktas, an attack claimed by the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (TAK) seen as a radical offshoot of the outlawed PKK rebel group.

In June, 47 people were killed in a triple suicide bombing and gun attack at Istanbul's Ataturk airport, with authorities blaming IS.

And in one of the most brazen strikes, an off-duty policeman assassinated Russia's ambassador to Turkey in an Ankara art gallery less than two weeks ago.

"No terror attack will destroy our unity, or eradicate our fraternity or weaken Turkey's effective fight against terror," Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag wrote on Twitter.

Mainly Muslin Turkey's religious affairs agency Diyanet condemned the attack, saying the fact it took place in a nightclub "was no different to it being in a market or place of worship".

Turkey is still reeling from a failed July coup blamed by the government on the US-based Islamic preacher Fethullah Gulen that has been followed by a relentless purge of his alleged supporters from state institutions.

"Tragic start to 2017 in Istanbul," NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg wrote on Twitter.

The White House condemned the "savagery" of the attack, with National Security Council spokesman Ned Price saying that Washington reaffirmed its support for its NATO ally "in our shared determination to confront and defeat all forms of terrorism".

The US embassy warned citizens that extremist groups are continuing "aggressive efforts to conduct attacks in areas where US citizens and expatriates reside or frequent."

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is in Istanbul for the New Year, had been informed of the attack, local media said.

The shooting spree came as the Turkish army wages a four-month incursion in Syria to oust IS jihadists and Kurdish militants from the border area, suffering increasing casualties.

As is customary after such attacks in Turkey, the authorities slapped a broadcast ban on images from the incident.

Comments

Naren kotian
 - 
Sunday, 1 Jan 2017

Israel actions are totally justified ...democracies must understand how to deal with jihadist menace ...religion of piece ....while shooting ...attacker shouting religious slogans. . time has come to mercilessly attack ...bomb them ...sympathy torsidre bennige chaaku haako jana...death to Islamic state ....rip innocents party goers.

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News Network
April 29,2024

USprotests.jpg

At least 900 protesters have been arrested since the launch of pro-Palestinian demonstrations on university campuses across the US, where students are raging against the Israeli regime’s US-backed genocidal war on Gaza.

The Washington Post reported the tally on Sunday, the 10th straight day of the protests that began after Columbia University set up an encampment to demand cessation of the war and press the school to divest from Israeli financial interests.

The crackdown then started when university authorities called in the police, a move that sparked more than 100 arrests on the university’s Manhattan campus.

Two other highlights in the crackdown saw police forces rounding up roughly the same number of people at New York University and Emerson College in Boston.

Protests have also erupted across numerous other seats of learning, including Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and California State Polytechnic in Humboldt.

The ensuing countrywide counter-campaign of suppression has seen law enforcement resorting to riot control methods against the protesters.

The methods have featured “the same tools and tactics” that were deployed to confront the thousands-strong protests that sparked across the country after a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd four years ago, the daily reported.

“At Emory University last week, Atlanta police said officers used ‘chemical irritants’ to clear an encampment, and a Georgia State Patrol officer was captured on video using a stun gun to subdue a man on the ground,” it said.

Academics have, meanwhile, been banding together throughout the US under the banner of Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (FSJP).

Earlier in April, the FSJP’s Georgia chapter called on Morehouse College in Atlanta, which invited Joe Biden as its 2024 commencement speaker, to rescind its invitation as a means of objecting to the president’s role in enabling the Israeli genocide.

At Biden’s behest, the United States has been providing the Israeli war with unreserved military and intelligence support.

The US has also vetoed several United Nations Security Council resolutions calling for an immediate ceasefire in the brutal military onslaught that has so far claimed the lives of at least 34,454 Gazans, mostly women and children.

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News Network
May 5,2024

Iran.jpg

Iran has urged Muslim countries to cut all relations with the Israeli regime as means of pressuring Tel Aviv to end its ongoing genocidal war on the Gaza Strip.

Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian made the remarks on Saturday, addressing the 15th Heads of State and Government Summit of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in Gambia’s capital Banjul.

“Beyond doubt, this time period will also pass by, despite all its hardships and adversities for the Palestinian nation,” he said.

“However, the manner and quality of the role that is played by us, Muslim states, in the face of this crisis will go down in history,” the top diplomat added.

“Undoubtedly, severance of diplomatic and economic ties and [imposition of] practical arms and trade embargo [on Israel] serves as an important means of cessation of its genocide in Gaza and atrocities in the West Bank and the Noble al-Quds.”

At least 34,654 people have died in Gaza since October 7, when the Israeli regime began the war in response to al-Aqsa Storm, a retaliatory operation by the coastal sliver’s resistance groups.

Despite the unabated campaign of bloodshed and destruction, the regime has so far fallen short of realizing its goals, including defeating Gaza’s resistance, causing forced displacement of the territory’s entire population to neighboring Egypt, and enabling the release of those who were taken captive during al-Aqsa Storm.

Amir-Abdollahian said Gaza’s developments proved that elimination of the Palestinian resistance “was nothing but an illusion.”

“Because the Israeli regime is not a legitimate government. It is only an occupying apartheid power,” he said, adding, “Passage of time is not going to lend legitimacy to an occupying power.”

The foreign minister asserted that realization of sustainable peace and security in the region was only possible through cessation of the regime’s occupation of Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon, return of the Palestinian refugees to their homeland, and manifestation of Palestinians’ right to self-determination.

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News Network
April 28,2024

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Students in Paris blocked access to a campus building at a French university on Friday, as pro-Palestine demonstrations reach Europe.

The students occupied the central campus building of the Paris Institute of Political Studies, known as Sciences Po, and dozens of others blocked its entrance, echoing protest action at American universities.

Students inspired by Gaza solidarity encampments at campuses in the United States blocked access to a campus building at the prestigious French university on Friday.

They blocked the entrance with trash cans, wooden platforms and other items.

The occupation of the Paris university campus came after police broke up a separate protest at the university’s amphitheater outside one of its Paris campuses.

Scores of student protesters gathered at the building’s windows, chanting slogans and holding placards reading “We are all Palestinians,” in defiance of administrators who students say called the police on their peers two days earlier.

Pro-Palestinian student protesters had occupied the amphitheater outside one of the university’s Paris campuses on Wednesday evening.

The US-style student protests, which began over the months-long Israeli regime’s genocidal war against Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip, kicked off in the United States and have now spread to European capitals as well as Australia.

In the German capital Berlin, several people were arrested as police violently cleared a camp of Gaza war protesters at the German parliament.

Pro-Palestinian activists are demanding a permanent ceasefire, an end to the Israeli atrocities, and an arms embargo of the Tel Aviv regime.

The Israeli regime launched the war on Gaza on October 7 last year. The genocidal war has killed more than 34,356 Palestinians, most of them women and children.

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