A Turkish prosecutor is looking to jail eight suspected Daesh terrorists for plotting a bomb attack on the Israeli Consulate in Istanbul.
The Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office in Istanbul is seeking up to 39 years in prison for the defendants who were arrested in May this year after a man reported to a district police station that one of the suspects, a Syrian national code-named "Abbas Isa," told him he was a bomber during a video phone call.
Isa, whom the man knew as “Kasım A.” and another suspect, Mujibullah Husaini, were caught at a marble workshop in the Beykoz district where police found large amounts of explosives typically used in bombs to create large-scale damage.
The suspects initially intended to target several spots in Istanbul’s busy Taksim district, including during Labor Day celebrations on May 1, but their essential target was the Israeli Consulate, as per a Daesh book of attack strategies, according to the prosecutor’s indictment released Wednesday.
Isa confessed during questioning to working for Daesh in Syria and later fleeing the terrorist group and illegally entering Türkiye in 2016.
According to media reports, he had served in the so-called ammunition unit of Daesh under ringleader Abu Omar and received training from Daesh’s so-called governor of Mosul, Abu Leys Al Hamduni.
Isa claimed he had learned bomb-making on the internet and was planning to attack the Israeli Consulate.
“I wrote in a group chat, which all groups named Durel Ulema and radical organizations can join, that I wanted to carry out a bomb attack and several people got in touch with me,” he said, adding that a man named Abu Salah told him about ways of building a bomb.
He later bought the materials to experiment with and even tested a bomb he built at the marble workshop, which he filmed with the phone of his boss’s son, Özgür Karalök, another suspect in the case.
He confessed that to avoid detection, he had ordered some of the materials on Karalök’s phone and some others on his own phone.
“I was aiming to build a large-scale bomb and attack the Israeli Consulate but I found out that the police there were Muslim Turks and so I changed my mind,” Isa told the prosecutors.
He said his family back in Syria had found him a fiancee, which he said was another factor that changed his mind about the attack.
He claimed he hadn’t received any orders from anyone to come to Türkiye.
Karalök, on the other hand, claimed the charges against him were “all slander made out of hostility because I am rich.”
Karalök denied being a Daesh member or that he had witnessed Isa’s test explosion.
Husaini, who had been staying at the same marble workshop with Isa whom he also knew as “Kasım,” claimed Isa told him the explosive chemicals were “medicine” when he enquired about them.
Isa showed Husaini the video of his test bomb explosion, raising Husaini’s suspicions.
“When I asked him, he said he used to be in the bomb business in Iraq but he had quit,” Husaini said in his testimony.
Isa’s brother Abdullah Musa, who had been staying with them at the workshop, once complained he would report Isa for being a Daesh member, according to Husaini.
The Israeli Consulate in Istanbul was evacuated last October due to security concerns, two weeks after Israel launched its war on the Gaza Strip, which has killed over 41,000 Palestinians since and drawn international outrage.
The consulate has been the target of most pro-Palestine protests in the past year, with thousands holding marches or sit-in demonstrations outside the building condemning Israel and calling for a free Palestine.
Türkiye has been rounding up Daesh-linked suspects in ramped-up operations since the terrorist group attacked a church during a Sunday Mass earlier in January.
Daesh remains the second biggest threat of terrorism for Türkiye, which faces security risks from multiple terrorist groups and was one of the first countries to declare it as a terrorist group in 2013. In December last year, Turkish security forces detained 32 suspects over alleged links with Daesh, who were planning attacks on churches and synagogues, as well as the Iraqi Embassy.
Daesh operates a so-called Khorasan Province (Daesh-K) network in Türkiye, which looks for "new methods" and recruits more foreign members for its activities after constant counterterrorism operations became a "challenge," security sources say.
