Story highlights Wood: We may never know much about the killing of the Russian ambassador

But President Erdogan and President Putin may be inclined to spin their own narratives

Andrew Wood is an associate fellow of the Russia and Eurasia Programme, Chatham House, and a former British ambassador to Moscow.

(CNN) The murder of Andrey Karlov at an art exhibition in Ankara, Turkey, is a tragedy.

As yet, we know very little about the motives of his killer, Mevlut Mert Altintas. Chances are, we never will.

But it is at least as possible that he acted as an individual in response to Russian actions in Aleppo as that he killed on the instructions of a wider group.

Both President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Vladimir Putin may nevertheless be inclined to structure the assassination into their existing narratives, different though these may be.

The idea of a wider conspiracy, going beyond the actions of a lone gunman, whose ability to get himself, armed, to stand right behind the Russian ambassador in order to shoot him needs explanation, is inherently more convincing to many minds than the proposition that he acted alone.