Tel Aviv – A man has taken hostages in the Turkish Embassy in Tel Aviv Tuesday after shots were fired outside, Israeli police and a Foreign Ministry official said.
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A newspaper identified the attacker as a Palestinian who tried to seek asylum at another embassy four years earlier.
“This is a hostage situation,” Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor told The Associated Press.
A lawyer told Israel Radio that the hostages, the consul and his wife, escaped.
As helicopters circled outside the beseiged Turkish embassy building in Tel Aviv on Tuesday, Foreign Ministry officials arrived in a black Mazda to negotiate with Turkish officials to allow Magen David Adom crews and police to enter the building, Channel 2 reported.
Tel Aviv police and ambulance crews have not been allowed to enter the embassy building to treat the man or determine what occurred during the shooting, as the building is considered Turkish sovereign territory.
The radio report said Turkish officials were not allowing Israeli police or rescue workers to enter the embassy.
The Israeli Maariv newspaper said the man called the paper, identifying himself as Nadim Injaz, a Palestinian who sought asylum at the British Embassy in Tel Aviv in 2006. He said he had a flammable liquid and threatened, “I will kill any Jew that enters.”
Lawyer Shafik Abuani told Israel Radio that he talked to the man three times by telephone, trying to calm him down. The lawyer said Injaz threatened to burn the embassy down if he is not granted asylum.
It was unclear what his relation to the hostage-taker was.
Abuani said he demanded to be flown to Turkey and said he was being persecuted by the Israeli Shin-Bet security force.
The lawyer said only the Turkish consul and his wife were in the building at the time, and they escaped. “I am in touch with the consul all the time by cell phone, and nothing happened to them, they’re OK,” he said.
Turkey withdrew its ambassador from Tel Aviv in the wake of the Israeli attack on a Turkish flotilla heading for Gaza on May 31, when nine pro-Palestinian activists were killed.
somthing fishy if you ask me
turkish flotilla now the turkish embassy in israel
Does anyone know if the shooting outside and the guy inside part of one incident
To # 1: No not fishy more like turkeyish, just as healthy though.
Let them burn who cares
Smells fishy…tastes like chicken?
(Reply to #1 🙂
What are you suggesting?
He sounds a bissel mishegeh to me!!!
If they won’t let the Police in then have the place shut down! Next thing we know we’ll have someone shoot up a crowd c’v and head in there. They have become an openly hostile country and Israel must recognize that.