Video: Armed Attack on İstanbul Police HQ

A newly published surveillance video shows a female member of the terrorist Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party/Front (DHKP/C) firing at the İstanbul Police Department with a long-barrel gun before she was killed by police in response to the attack.

The attacker, identified as Elif Sultan Kalsen by authorities, was killed on Wednesday as she attacked the city’s main police headquarters while carrying a bomb. Another attacker fled the scene but was later captured.

The video that emerged on Thursday shows Kalsen firing at the building with a long-barrel gun.

Kalsen was earlier suspected of having carried out two terrorist attacks in İstanbul.

In the first she was suspected to have been behind an attack involving a female suicide bomber at a police station in İstanbul’s historic Sultanahmet district in early January, which led to the death of the suicide bomber and one police officer, wounding one other.

The far-left DHKP/C claimed responsibility for the Sultanahmet attack. However, Kalsen’s family, who went with their lawyers to the Council of Forensic Medicine (ATK) to identify the bomber on Jan. 7, reported that the bomber’s body did not belong to their daughter as alleged by authorities. The attacker turned out to be Diana Ramazowa, a Russian national.

A female assailant who fired a machine gun at riot police in Taksim Square in downtown İstanbul in February was also identified as Kalsen for whom an arrest warrant had already been issued in relation to several terrorist attacks in the past.