CHP leader accuses gov’t of ‘protecting’ ISIL, laying ground for Ankara massacre

ANKARA

AP photo

Turkey’s main opposition leader has openly and directly accused the caretaker of the interim government of providing “protection” for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), thus paving the way for the Oct. 10 Ankara double suicide bombing which killed at least 102 people.

Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the leader of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), reiterated his conviction that a serious security failure led to the attack.

“How did 102 people die? The Prime Minister [Ahmet Davutoğlu] confessed that no measure was taken. Here is my conviction: Actually, the police department knows all about it. Shouldn’t a person who is already wiretapped be tracked?” Kılıçdaroğlu asked in an interview with Samanyolu Haber TV channel late on Oct. 19.

Earlier on the evening of Oct. 19, the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office announced that one of the two suicide bombers in the Oct.10 Ankara Massacre was Yunus Emre Alagöz, the brother of Şeyh Abdurrahman Alagöz, who was the perpetrator in the Suruç suicide bomb attack that killed 33 members of a socialist youth group and wounded more than 100 on July 20.

“The only reason for not having security measures taken or for not having them [suspects] detained is the absence of an instruction from the political authority to fulfill whatever was required. That’s to say, its [the political authority’s] protection of ISIL. This is not an observation, I’m saying this very openly and clearly,” Kılıçdaroğlu said.

The prosecutor’s office said Alagöz had come to Turkey from Syria but gave no timeframe for his return.

Hürriyet Daily News reported on Oct. 18 that the Alagöz brothers, along with at least 16 other suspects, were in a group probed for their links to al-Qaeda and ISIL, and they had been under wiretap surveillance within the framework of an investigation into al-Qaeda since September 2013.

But the suspects, who are listed in the roster of wanted suspects prepared by the national police force and the National Intelligence Agency (MİT), were cleared in the investigation into the group known as “Dokumacıs” in the southeastern province of Adıyaman.