AhlulBayt News Agency (ABNA): Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan on Monday described a mass shooting which killed 50 people at two New Zealand mosques as part of a wider attack on Turkey and threatened to send back “in caskets” anyone who tried to take the battle to Istanbul.
Erdogan has invoked the New Zealand attack as evidence of global anti-Muslim sentiment.
“They are testing us from 16,500 km away, from New Zealand, with the messages they are giving from there. This isn’t an individual act, this is organized,” he said, without elaborating.
Australian Brenton Tarrant, 28, a suspected white supremacist, was charged with murder on Saturday after a lone gunman killed 50 people at mosques in the city of Christchurch.
At weekend election rallies Erdogan showed video footage of the shootings, which the gunman had broadcast on Facebook, earning a rebuke from New Zealand’s foreign minister who said it could endanger New Zealanders abroad.
Erdogan also displayed extracts from a “manifesto” posted online by the attacker and later taken down.
He has said the gunman issued threats against Turkey and the president himself, and wanted to drive Turks from Turkey’s northwestern, European region. Majority Muslim Turkey’s largest city, Istanbul, is split between an Asian part east of the Bosphorus, and a European half to the west.
“We have been here for 1,000 years and will be here until the apocalypse, God willing,” Erdogan told a rally on Monday commemorating the 1915 Gallipoli campaign, when Ottoman soldiers defeated British-led forces including Australian and New Zealand troops trying to seize the peninsula, a gateway to Istanbul.
“You will not turn Istanbul into Constantinople,” he added, referring to the city’s name under its Christian Byzantine rulers before it was conquered by Muslim Ottomans in 1453.
“Your grandparents came here... and they returned in caskets,” he said. “Have no doubt we will send you back like your grandfathers.”
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, who was in Christchurch and visited Turkish citizens wounded in the attack, said Muslims around the world were worried about Islamophobia and racism.
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source : Reuters
Tuesday
19 March 2019
7:57:04 AM
933742
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan on Monday described a mass shooting which killed 50 people at two New Zealand mosques as part of a wider attack on Turkey and threatened to send back “in caskets” anyone who tried to take the battle to Istanbul.