Three big burdens on the Turkish police

I was talking to a ranking official about the escape of Abdulgadir Masharipov, the Tajik-origin Uzbek citizen who is wanted for killing 39 people on Jan. 1 in Istanbul's Reina nightclub on behalf of the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL), or DEASH in Arabic.

"We have problems," the official said with obvious embarrassment. "We have still not been able to cope with the fact that the killer who assassinated the ambassador was a member of the Turkish police force." The official, who asked to remain unanimous, was talking about the murder of Russian Ambassador to Ankara Andrey Karlov on Dec. 19, 2016, as Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu was literally on his way to Moscow for a key meeting on Syria.

The killer, who was killed afterwards in a clash with his colleagues, was Mevlüt Mert Altıntaş, a police officer working for the police department which is in charge of protecting VIP targets against terrorists. Nobody claimed responsibility for the assassination, but the indications showed that all of the young policeman's social environment and education background was linked to the illegal network of Fethullah Gülen. An Islamist preacher living in the U.S., Gülen is accused of masterminding the foiled coup of July 15, 2016, in Turkey.

Upon a demand by Russian President Vladimir Putin from Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan, a Russian team of security experts have come to Turkey to solve the Karlov assassination, with no results made public so far.
It was interesting, though, that the ranking official, when asked about the Reina attack by ISIL, answered the question with a reference to the Russian's ambassador's assassination in Ankara.

Perhaps it was because the official thought that both incidents partly occurred because...