The man charged with killing 39 people on New Year’s Eve at Istanbul’s exclusive Reina nightclub, Abdulkadir Masharipov, has tes-tified before a Turkish court saying: ‘my purpose was to kill Christians’.
The Uzbek national told the judge interrogating him that he was a member of so-called Islamic State, which had claimed responsibility for the attack the following day. IS had defined the massacre as revenge for Turkish military involvement in Syria. But Masaripov insisted that he did not consider his actions as an attack against the Turkish state.
Rather, the jihadist said: ‘I believed it was an act of revenge against the murderous actions carried out by the world’s Christians, an act of retaliation on their holiday,’ Masharipov told the court. Observance of New Year’s Day is discouraged by many orthodox Muslims.
