A Turkish policeman has shot dead Russia's Ambassador to Turkey, Andrei Karlov, apparently in protest the policeman at Russia's involvement in Aleppo.
The incident reportedly happened a day after protests in Turkey over Russian support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Andrei Karlov was attacked at the opening of an art exhibition in Ankara by a man believed to be an off-duty Turkish police officer. Karlov was several minutes into a speech when he was shot. Footage of the attack showed a man dressed in a suit and tie standing calmly behind the ambassador. He then pulled out a gun, shouted “Allahu Akbar” and fired at least eight shots.
The Guardian reports that after firing at the ambassador, the man shouted in Turkish: “Don’t forget Aleppo. Don’t forget Syria. Unless our towns are secure, you won’t enjoy security. Only death can take me from here. Everyone who is involved in this suffering will pay a price.”
He also shouted in Arabic: “We are the one who pledged allegiance to Muhammad, to wage jihad.”
Turkey's president said the attack was aimed at hurting ties with Russia.
According to the BBC, Recep Tayyip Erdogan spoke to Russian President Vladimir Putin by phone and, in a video message, said that they both agreed it was an act of "provocation".
The Russian President, Vladimir Putin, called the killing a “provocation” aimed at sabotaging a rapprochement between Moscow and Ankara and attempts to resolve the conflict in Syria.
“The crime that was committed is without doubt a provocation aimed at disrupting the normalization of Russian-Turkish relations and disrupting the peace process in Syria that is being actively advanced by Russia, Turkey and Iran,” he said in televised comments.
Putin said: “There can be only one answer to this – stepping up the fight against terrorism, and the bandits will feel this.”
Putin said that Russian officials would be dispatched to Ankara to investigate the killing. “We have to know who directed the hand of the killer,” he said.
“A Russian investigative team is scheduled to arrive in Turkey on Tuesday to assist local authorities,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was cited as saying by Russian media outlets.
Russia’s Sputnik news agency reports that Ankara Mayor İbrahim Melih Gokcek speculated that Altıntaş may have been a member of a terrorist organization and related to Fethullah Gulen.
Turkish special forces surrounded the gallery and killed the attacker. Three other people were wounded.
Local media outlets said security guards at the scene had told them that the killer showed a police ID to enter the gallery. The Turkish interior ministry named the attacker as Mevlut Mert Altıntas, an officer in Ankara’s riot police squad, who was born in 1994 in Aydin and graduated from Izmir police academy.
The shooter’s family home in the western province of Aydin was later searched and his mother, father and sister were detained, according to Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news agency. Altıntas’s house in Ankara was raided and his roommate, also a police officer, was also taken into custody, it said.
CNN reports that in a separate incident hours later, Turkish police arrested a man who fired into the air with a shotgun outside the US Embassy in Ankara. Video fed by Turkish video news agency IHA reportedly showed a handcuffed man being led by security officers into an unmarked police car as he shouted "I swear to God. Don't play with us," in Turkish.
