Russian citizen revealed to be suicide bomber who attacked Istanbul police

Çetin Aydın ISTANBUL

A police officer stands guard under the snow on a street leading to a police station after a female suicide bomber was killed on Jan. 6. AFP Photo / Bülent Kılıç

A female suicide bomber who detonated herself at an Istanbul police station in the touristic area of Sultanahmet has been identified as a Russian citizen named Diana Ramazova.

A policeman, Kenan Kumaş, was killed in the suicide attack by a woman at the Tourism Police Station on Jan. 6.

The investigation was conducted by the police and the National Intelligence Organization (MİT).

It was reported that “foreign phone numbers” were found in the cellphone of the assailant, who spoke Russian with a taxi driver before the attack. The clues reportedly led the police to believe that the woman, who entered Turkey in June 2014 as a tourist, might be Chechen.

After Turkish media reported the identity of the assailant, Kavkazpress, a Russian-language news website, reported that Diana Ramazova was a Russian citizen from the Republic of Daghestan, who was "radicalized by the Wahabi ideology."

Ramazova was married with children in Istanbul and was pregnant when she was killed by the bomb she carried, Kavkazpress noted, adding that Russian authorities started an investigation in Daghestan following the attack.

Turkish police, meanwhile, are investigating Ramazova's possible links to al-Qaeda or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

Before the suicide bomber’s identity was revealed by the authorities, it was claimed that the outlawed Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party/Front (DHKP/C), which had fired guns in another attack on the city’s police a week ago, could also be behind the Sultanahmet attack.

Although the DHKP/C had initially claimed the Sultanahmet attack, the family of the alleged bomber, Elif Sultan Kalsen, said the body at the morgue did not belong to their daughter.