Reina Rumors: Santa Claus, Mashrapov, and the Kyrgyz Friend

The new year began with tragedy in Turkey. While more than 600 people reveled in the first moments of 2017 at Reina, a popular nightclub on the banks of the Bosphorus, a man got out of a car and took a long-barreled rifle from the trunk. He shot two people – a police officer and civilian – outside the club and then entered the building, where he killed 37 more and injured 69 others.

A Rumor of Santa Claus

The first rumors to ripple out extrapolated from fuzzy CCTV footage that the gunman – two, some claimed – had been dressed as Santa Claus. The story of a terrorist assaulting a symbol of Western depravity while dressed as Jolly Saint Nick was too good to pass up.

As the world sobered up later, and witness accounts circulated, the initial report was proven false. Turkish media also began reporting that the killer was just one gunman.

On January 2, Turkish authorities released a video taken by the alleged attacker of himself in Taksim Square and a headshot clipped from a surveillance video. Laith Alkhouri, a director at Flashpoint, an American business risk intelligence company tracking terrorist and cyber threats, told CNN that the “selfie video” appeared first on a pro-ISIS Telegram account before being picked up by Turkish media, suggesting the attacker had support if not coordination from the group. An Islamic State Twitter account celebrated the attack, posting a statement that read, “In continuation of the blessed operations which ISIS carries out against Turkey, a soldier of the brave caliphate attacked one of the most popular nightclubs while Christians were celebrating their holiday.”

The Turkish police shared a pair of images – one from a surveillance camera and the other a still from the selfie video – in hopes of aiding their manhunt and Turkish media began quoting anonymous sources as saying that the attacker was either Kyrgyz or Uzbek.

Then a photo of a passport appeared on social media with Turkish commentators claiming the man depicted – 28-year-old Iakhe Mashrapov of Kyrgyzstan – was the attacker.

The Case of the Mistaken Mashrapov

The news confirmed all the worst beliefs in Turkey – and elsewhere – about Central Asian terrorists. Hundreds of thousands of Central Asians work in Turkey as migrant workers. Many more pass through Turkey’s major airport – Ataturk – on their way to anywhere else. Indeed, when Ataturk was the site of a suicide bombing attack last summer, the killers were first reported as Kyrgyz, Uzbek, or Tajik. Later, Russian passports and Chechen names surfaced but many media outlets still report that at least one of the attackers was Kyrgyz.

Like the Santa Claus rumor, the Kyrgyz suspect theory was proven false. A local Kyrgyz news site tracked Mashrapov down in his hometown of Kara-Suu. According to Mashrapov, he travels to Turkey frequently for business and flew to Istanbul on December 28 and returned to Kyrgyzstan on December 30. He was in Bishkek when the attack occurred. Stamps in Mashrapov’s passport supported his story.

Mashrapov flew back to Istanbul on January 1. He returned to the airport to depart again on January 3 and, as he tells it, passed through security and boarded his plane. He was then taken off the plane and the flight delayed for over an hour as police interrogated him. Eventually, however, Turkish police were satisfied that Mashrapov was not the man in the pictures, apologized, and put him back on the plane.

After getting home to Kara-Suu, Mashrapov said the Kyrgyz security services paid him a visit but also determined that he was not the Reina attacker.

Meanwhile, the Turkish state media agency, Anadolu, reported that two foreigners had been arrested at Ataturk. The manhunt included dozens of other arrests and increased scrutiny on Central Asian migrant communities, which are already under pressure. Like migrant communities everywhere, all the worst rumors are applied to Central Asian migrants in Turkey – they’re poor, dirty, illegal, and hide terrorists among them.

The Professional Conspiracy

On January 15, Turkish police raided a house in Silivri, a city and district just outside the Istanbul metropolitan area on the European side, and found $150,000, which Hürriyet reported was payment for the attacker, who had since been identified as an Uzbek militant. The next day, Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmuş said the Reina attack had been orchestrated by a professional intelligence agency.

“It appears the Reina attack was not just a terrorist organization’s act, but there was also an intelligence organization involved. It was an extremely planned and organized act,” Kurtulmuş said.

Rumor said that the U.S. Embassy had warned its citizens about the impending attack – evidence that the Americans knew it was going to happen. The rumor is an absurdist reading of a December 22 warning issued by the Embassy in Istanbul, advising American citizens to be cautions about holiday attacks. The U.S. State Department has had near constant threat warnings posted regarding Turkey in the past year and all State warnings advise against large public gatherings.

After the Reina nightclub attack, the U.S. Embassy issued a clarification, noting that “‎Contrary to to rumors circulating in social media, the U.S. Government had no information about threats to specific entertainment venues, including the Reina Club, and ‎the U.S. Government did not warn Americans to stay away from specific venues or neighborhoods.”

The “Kyrgyz Friend” and the Child

After Mashrapov – the unfortunate Kyrgyz businessman – was exonerated, Turkish authorities said the real suspect was an Uzbek militant by the name of Abdulgadir Masharipov, who allegedly used the name Ebu Muhammed Horasani.

Late on January 16, Turkish police raided a house in Esenyurt, an Istanbul neighborhood on the European side, about 19 miles from the Reina nightclub. Pictures of a man – presumably Masharipov – beaten and bloodied while allegedly resisting arrest began circulating. Four others were detained at the same house.

Reports of Masharipov’s arrest also came suffused with falsehoods.

First reports sourced to Turkish state media and repeated by the BBC, The Guardian, and others, said that Masharipov, after fleeing the massacre at Reina, hid in a safehouse, joined by his wife and 4-year-old son. Hürriyet, a Turkish newspaper, reported that he then fled with his son and was caught in the house of a Kyrgyz friend in Esenyurt. Those initial reports said the Kyrgyz man was among the four others detained and that the son was there when his father was arrested.

However, on January 17, Vasip Sahin, the governor of Istanbul, gave a press conference about the capture. He spoke about the massive manhunt and Masharipov’s terrorist credentials – “He's received training in Afghanistan and speaks four languages… a terrorist that has been well brought up” – but reportedly said nothing about the son or a Kyrgyz friend.

Instead, Sahin said that Masharipov – a 33-year old Uzbek citizen – was arrested along with an Iraqi man, and three women from Egypt, Senegal, and Somalia. Sahin said Masharipov most likely entered Turkey in January 2016.

The Kyrgyz Ministry of Foreign Affairs reported that there were no Kyrgyz citizens among those detained in relation to the Reina attack.

A Gaggle of Rumors and a Gagged Press

The Reina attack – and ensuing manhunt – is a lesson about the rush to report news immediately and source it thinly, but it is also an object lesson in the vital role of serious, and independent, media. In the past several months, Turkey has detained the largest number of journalists in the world, cracked down on independent and critical outlets and terrified its own press corps into parroting the state line. A gagged press can do little but repeat a tempting gaggle of rumors.

The repeated failure of the Turkish press – as it exists now, hollowed out – to treat dubious information with a critical eye has serious consequences.

One can image, for example, the Kyrgyz trader misidentified as the killer having a difficult time continuing to conduct his business and other Kyrgyz are likely to be viewed, by some, as guilty by association – even if the association was a lie.

On a larger scale, officials accusing foreign, professional intelligence agencies of organizing attacks will do little but continue to cut at the frayed ties between Turkey and the West. That kind of suspicion, when uttered by an official source, has a heavy influence on public perception which feeds, eventually, back into how politicians manage state relationships.