ISIS Terror Bomber Stalked His Israeli Tour Victims in Istanbul — Report
JERUSALEM — The reports published Monday run counter to those of intelligence assessments that said the Israelis were not deliberately targeted.
On Monday, journalist Abdullah Bozkury of Today’s Zaman posted on Twitter that the bomber followed the Israeli tourists from their hotel and lurked outside the restaurant until they finished their breakfast and began to exit, then he detonated the bomb.
He identified the bomber as being affiliated with the Islamic State terrorist group.
The Turkish reports,which also include Hurriyet and T24, do not name sources.
#Turkey: #ISIL bomber followed #Israel tourist group from the moment they left their hotel in Beşiktaş district, trailed them to Istiklal.
— Abdullah Bozkurt (@abdbozkurt) March 21, 2016
On Sunday, the suicide bomber was identified as a Turkish citizen, Mehmet Ozturk, by Turkey’s interior minister.
“The findings obtained show that the terrorist is linked to the Daesh terror organization,” said the minister, Efkan Ala, according to The Associated Press. Daesh is an acronym for the Islamic State.
He reportedly spent two years in Syria before returning to Turkey illegally.
In televised comments Saturday following the blast and an emergency meeting of Israel’s Security Cabinet, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said officials were investigating whether Israelis had been targeted in the bombing and said intelligence pointed to it being an Islamic State attack.
The three Israeli victims killed in the bombing are Avraham Goldman, 69, of Herzliya; Yonatan Suher, 40, of Tel Aviv, and Simcha Damri, 60, of Dimona. Suher and Goldman also were U.S. citizens.
Eleven Israelis were wounded in the blast, including Damri’s husband, Avi.
The fourth victim of the attack was an Iranian national identified as Ali Reza Razmhah.
Also Sunday, Israel’s Counter-Terrorism Bureau issued a travel warning calling on Israelis not to travel to Turkey. The warning cites the significant rise over the past two months in terror threats in Turkey, especially suicide bombings and particularly in Istanbul and Ankara, the capital.
The warning was raised to Level 2, defined as a basic concrete threat, from Level 4, meaning an ongoing potential threat.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO