News / Turkey

Death toll from Istanbul attacks rises to 45

Saturday, 02 July 2016 3:38 PM [ Last Update: Saturday, 02 July 2016 3:38 PM ]

Turkish special force police officers stand guard as flight attendants walk nearby the explosion site at the Istanbul Ataturk Airport, Turkey, July 1, 2016. (AFP photo)

Turkish media have updated the death toll from the recent terror attacks in Istanbul, saying 45 are now confirmed dead as a result of the bombings and the shooting attack at the Ataturk international airport.

The semi-official Dogan news agency said Saturday that a Jordanian child died of wounds he sustained in the attacks on June 28.

The four-year-old Rayyan Mohammed was one of more than 200 people injured in the attacks.

The office of Istanbul’s governor said 52 people were still in hospital and that 20 of them were being treated in the intensive care. It said 184 victims have been discharged from health centers so far, including 13 people who were released on Saturday.

The assaults saw three men with assault rifles and bombs attacking people in one of the world’s busiest airports. There has yet to emerge a claim of responsibility for the high-profile attacks, although Turkish officials point the finger at the Takfiri terrorists of Daesh.

“It is clear that this was Daesh … their place is in hell,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Friday.

Turkish authorities have said that the attackers were presumably a Russian, an Uzbek and a Kyrgyz national. The Turkish state-run news agency Anadolu named two of them Friday as Rakim Bulgarov and Vadim Osmanov, without elaborating on their nationalities. Other reports in the media have identified the third and purportedly the mastermind behind the attacks as Akhmed Chatayev, a Chechen, who has been described as the head of a Daesh cell in Istanbul.

Turkey has been hit hard by attacks either by Daesh or the Kurdish militants over the past months. Many blame Ankara’s policies vis-à-vis the crisis in neighboring Syria and Iraq as the main reason behind the surge in acts of terror.

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