Police shoot dead two assailants outside Istanbul court

ISTANBUL

Two people have been shot dead while trying to attack a courthouse in Istanbul on Feb. 6, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya has announced.

The man and woman were killed during an attempt to attack a security checkpoint at the Çağlayan courthouse at 11:46 a.m. local time, the minister posted on social media.

Initially, officials reported six injuries, including three police officers. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan later announced the death of a citizen wounded in the attack, without providing further details.

Camera footage showed the assailants being gunned down on the building's forecourt. They appeared to shoot back at police before they were killed.

Other images showed people sheltering by the gates of a metal detector inside the courthouse or running for cover. Police officers helped a man who appeared to have been wounded in the leg.

Yerlikaya later identified the attackers as members of the DHKP-C, a far-left group considered a terrorist organization in Türkiye, the United States and the European Union.

The chief public prosecutor’s office in Istanbul has opened an investigation, Justice Minister Yılmaz Tunç said.

The DHKP-C has been largely inactive in recent years. In March 2015, the group took a prosecutor hostage at the same courthouse, demanding details about the police killing of a teenager during anti-government protests the previous year.

Two gunmen died as police stormed the building, and the prosecutor later died of his injuries.

Çağlayan, which is also known as the Istanbul Justice Palace, is a huge court complex in the Kağıthane district on the city’s European side. Heavily guarded and with multiple entrances, it was Europe’s largest courthouse at the time of its opening in 2011.

The group also claimed responsibility for a February 2013 suicide bomb attack on the U.S. Embassy in Ankara in which a Turkish security guard was killed and four other people wounded.

Last month, a man was shot and killed at an Istanbul church in an attack that was claimed by the ISIL.

Two men were later arrested on suspicion of killing Tuncer Cihan, 52, on Jan. 28 at the Santa Maria Church in the Büyükdere neighborhood. Dozens of suspected ISIL members and supporters also were detained.