This Sunday, November 13 looked like an almost ordinary day in Istanbul. Istiklal Avenue, the city’s busiest pedestrian thoroughfare, was packed with people and the sun gave off the air of an Indian summer. When the sound of an explosion sounded, at 4:20 p.m., right in the middle of the passage, at the intersection of the small Imam-Adnan street, between the Mango clothing store and the Mado ice cream parlor, just a few meters from an Yves Rocher boutique and a McDonald’s.
The explosion was heard hundreds of meters away, quickly covered by a cloud of police and ambulance sirens. In a few minutes, the adjacent streets were blocked and the police on the teeth. Here, banned Russian tourists, there, an old cafe owner with his hands on his head, recalling the waves of previous attacks and their disastrous effects on his customers. At the corner of rue Bekar, an ambulance driver who won’t say his name says in a blank voice that there is “Many dead, many wounded too…” And to add, much more furiously: “He’s a suicide bomber, a terrorist, terror, you understand? »
For a good hour, rumors continued to circulate on social networks, before access to the Internet was reduced. Fake videos on Twitter. Bloody images too, taken from a high window just above the site of the explosion, deleted shortly after they were posted online. Several messages claim that it was a woman who was behind the attack. A woman veiled in black and wearing military pants, according to a tweet from the Oda TV channel, known for its proximity to police circles.
“An act probably perpetrated by a woman”
For a long time, there was only talk of a dozen injuries. Shortly before 6 p.m., the prefecture announced 4 dead and 38 injured. A figure quickly raised to 6 dead and 81 injured, partly taken up by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in a televised speech lasting a few minutes. He denounces a “bomb attack”, “a cowardly attack, which the specialized units will try to solve by looking for the perpetrators and the sponsors”ensuring that “Terrorist attacks have never succeeded, neither in the past nor in the present, in subduing our people”. A few minutes earlier, Vice-President Fuat Oktay specified for his part that the police forces were working on “a terrorist act probably perpetrated by a woman”.
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