Dawn arrests in city bring to 24 number of people detained in relation to investigation

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

Turkish police have detained 11 foreigners suspected of belonging to an Islamic State cell linked to the recent attack on Istanbul’s main airport, state media reported.

Forty-four people were killed in Tuesday’s bombings and shootings, which targeted one of the world’s busiest airports. The three suspected attackers were Russian, Uzbek and Kyrgyz nationals, a Turkish government official has said.

Istanbul airport attack: Turkey says bombers were from Russia and central Asia Read more

The pro-government Yenisafak newspaper has said the organiser of the attack was suspected to be a man of Chechen origin called Akhmed Chatayev.

Chatayev is identified on a United Nations sanctions list as a leader in Isis responsible for training Russian-speaking militants.He was arrested in Bulgaria five years ago on a Russian extradition request but freed because he had refugee status in Austria, a Bulgarian judge said. A year later he was wounded and captured in Georgia but again released.

Friday’s dawn arrests by counter-terror police in the European side of Istanbul brought to 24 the number of people detained in the investigation, the state-run Anadolu agency said. A police spokesman could not confirm the report.

Turkish officials have not given many details beyond confirming the attackers’ nationalities. They have previously said forensic teams were struggling to identify the suicide bombers from their limited remains.

Yenisafak has said the Russian bomber was from Dagestan, which borders Chechnya where Moscow has led two wars against separatists and Islamist militants since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

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Turkey’s Hürriyet newspaper named the Russian bomber as Osman Vadinov and said he had come from Raqqa, the heart of Isis-controlled territory in Syria. The Russian interior ministry said it was checking information about Vadinov.

In 2012, Georgian officials said Chatayev had been wounded in a special forces operation against an unidentified group in the remote Lopota gorge near the border with Dagestan. The group was believed to be made up of Russian Islamist insurgents fighting against Moscow’s rule in the North Caucasus.

Chatayev, whose foot was later amputated due to his injuries, was arrested on charges of weapons possession. He denied the charges and said he had been sent to the gorge as a negotiator at the request of Georgian officials.

He was released on the orders of a Georgian court later that year and cleared of all charges in January 2013. “He was released lawfully, whether it was a mistake or not,” Georgia’s former interior minister Vakhtang Gomelauri said this year.

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In 2011 Chatayev was detained by Bulgarian police at the border with Turkey as Russia wanted him for “participation in an armed group and for the recruitment of persons for terrorism and for financing terrorism”, a Bulgarian judge told Bulgarian national radio on Friday.

However, the Bulgarian court refused to extradite him, saying his refugee status, which had been granted to him in Austria in 2003, remained valid in all countries that were signatories to the Geneva Convention, which included Bulgaria.

Separately, Turkish security forces detained four Turkish citizens on Wednesday at the Öncüpinar border crossing with Syria on suspicion of membership of a terrorist group, the local governor’s office said. The four were attempting to return to Turkey from a conflict zone in Syria under Isis control, it said.