A masked Turkish police officer secures a road leading to the U.S. Consulate building in Istanbul
Two assailants opened fire at the heavily protected U.S. Consulate building in Istanbul yesterday, touching off a gunfight with police before fleeing the scene, Turkish media reports said.
One of the assailants, a woman, was later captured at a nearby building and hospitalized. Turkey’s state-run Anadolu Agency, quoting unnamed police sources, said she has been identified as a member of a banned leftist group. The Istanbul governor’s office said police were searching for a second woman involved in the attack.
Anadolu named the captured assailant as 42-year-old Hatice Asik and said she is a member of the far-left Revolutionary People’s Liberation Army-Front, or DHKP-C. The group claimed responsibility for a 2013 suicide attack on the U.S. Embassy in Ankara, which killed a Turkish security guard.
No one else was injured in the onslaught.
Hours earlier an overnight bomb attack at a police station in Istanbul injured three policemen and seven civilians and caused a fire that collapsed part of the three-story building. Police said the assailants exploded a car bomb near the station. Unknown assailants later fired on police inspecting the scene of the explosion, sparking another gunfight with police that killed a member of the police inspection team and two assailants.
There were no immediate claims of responsibility and it was not known if the attack on the police was connected to the Consulate assault. Lefteris Pitarakis and Suzan Fraser, Istanbul, AP
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