Turkey Mourns After 41 Killed at Istanbul Airport

ByDAVID CAPLAN ABCNews logo
Wednesday, June 29, 2016

People in Turkey are mourning, the day after a terrorist attack at Ataturk International Airport in Istanbul left 41 people dead and 239 others injured, according to Istanbul Gov. Vasip Sahin.

Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim, who said a trio of armed attackers arrived at the airport in a taxi and blew themselves up after opening fire, is convinced ISIS was behind the attack.

Turkey's President Tayyip Erdogan said this morning, "This attack once again revealed the dark face of terrorist organizations targeting innocent civilians. It is obvious that this attack does not aim to attain any results but merely aims to produce propaganda material against our country by shedding the blood of and causing pain for innocent civilians."

No Americans are on Turkish authorities' list of killed foreign nationals.

Thirteen foreigners were among the dead, Turkish officials said, including three dual Turkish citizens. Five of the foreign victims were from Saudi Arabia, and the others were from elsewhere in the Middle East and Asia, officials said.

Of the 239 injured, 109 have been discharged from the hospital, and 130 are still receiving treatment, officials said.

No U.S. military personnel are among the injured or killed, a defense official said.

After the attack, anxious friends and family members of the victims congregated at Istanbul's Bakirkoy Hospital, where the victims were taken.

"You can hear that people are wailing here," Serdar Tatlisu, a relative of a victim, told The Associated Press. "We cannot cope anymore. We can't just stay still. We need some kind of solution for whatever problem there is."

While victims' loved ones descended on the hospital, Turkish officials scrambled to restart operations at the country's largest airport.

The airport resumed departures today at 2:20 a.m. local time.

Ataturk is the world's 11th-busiest airport, with 61.8 million passengers last year.

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