Three killed in shooting near Israeli consulate in Turkiye’s Istanbul

DEVELOPING STORY, Two police officers were also injured in the gunfire incident near the Israeli consulate.Three people have been killed and two police officers injured in a gunfire incident ⁠near the building housing the Israeli consulate in the Turkish city of Istanbul, according to Turkiye’s media reports.Three people were involved in the gunfire on Tuesday but have been “eliminated” by Turkish police, said Al Jazeera’s Sinem Koseoglu.The Reuters news agency video showed a police officer pulling out a gun and taking cover as gunshots resounded. One person ⁠was seen covered in ⁠blood.The area where the consulate building is located, meanwhile, is densely populated and houses many businesses, including international ones, with “thousands” of people working nearby, said Koseoglu.The Israeli consulate is on the seventh floor of one tall building in the area, she added, which is in the Yapi Kredi Plaza on Buyukdere Street in Istanbul’s Besiktas district.“The eyewitness that I spoke to … he was just smoking with his colleague, and three people came in a car, tried to open a gunfire, and then the security fired them back,” said Koseoglu, reporting from Istanbul.There are no Israeli diplomats serving in the consulate building in Istanbul, and no Israeli diplomats in the Israeli embassy in the Turkish capital of Ankara, “which means the employees who are inside those diplomatic missions are mostly the locals who are working for the consulate or embassy”, Koseoglu added.Attackers identifiedAccording to Turkish Interior Minister Mustafa Ciftci, the attacker have been identified.He said that they arrived from Izmit, a city about 100km (62 miles) east of Istanbul, in a rental car, noting that “one had links to a group that exploits religion”, while another, one of two brothers among the attackers had a prior drug-related record.