At least 6 people died and more than 80 others were injured in an explosion on Sunday, on the busiest pedestrian artery in the Turkish megalopolis. The premises had already been targeted in the 2000s and in 2016.
by Nicolas Bourcier (Istanbul, correspondent)
This Sunday, November 13, looked like an almost ordinary day in Istanbul. Avenue Istiklal, the most popular pedestrian artery in the city, was black in people and the sun was giving itself Indian summer tunes. When the sound of an explosion sounds at 4:20 p.m., in the middle of the passage, at the intersection of the little street Imam-Adnan, between the Mango clothing store and the Mado glacier, just a few meters from A Yves Rocher shop and a McDonald’s.
The blast was heard hundreds of meters away, quickly covered by a cloud of police and ambulances. In a few minutes, the adjacent streets were barred and the police on the teeth. Here, prohibited Russian tourists, there, an old coffee boss hands on their heads, recalling the waves of previous attacks and their disastrous effects on its customers. At the corner of Bekar Street, an ambulancer who will not say his name loose in a white voice that there are “deaths, many, also injured, many …” and add, much more angry: “C ‘is a suicide bomber, a terrorist, the terror, do you understand? “
For a good hour, rumors stopped circulating on social networks, before access to the Internet was reduced. False videos on Twitter. Bloody images too, taken from a window in height, just above the place of the explosion, erased shortly after their online. Several messages say that it was a woman who would have been behind the attack. A woman veiled in black and wearing military pants, according to a tweet of the ODA TV channel, known for her proximity to the police.
“An act probably perpetrated by a woman”
For a long time, there were only about ten injured. Shortly before 6 p.m., the prefecture announced 4 dead and 38 injured. A figure quickly noted at 6 dead and 81 injured, partly taken up by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in a television address of a few minutes. He denounces a “bomb attack” there, “a loose attack, that the specialized units will try to resolve by looking for the authors and the sponsors”, assuring that “the terrorist attacks have never succeeded, neither in the past nor by the present, to submit our people “. A few minutes before, Vice-President Fuat Oktay said that the police were working on “a terrorist act probably perpetrated by a woman”.
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