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Police: No foreign involvement in questioning of CIA
Defne Bayrak, the Turkish wife of bomber Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, was questioned for nearly five hours at the police anti-terror department before being released late on Thursday. The İstanbul Police Department said in a statement following her release that she had been questioned at the request of the İstanbul Public Prosecutor’s Office. “Foreign security organizations had no involvement in the process,” the statement said.
Speaking to reporters before her questioning at the police station, Bayrak, covered in a black chador, said she regarded her husband as a martyr in the holy war against the United States. “I am proud of him; my husband has carried out a great operation in this war. May God accept his martyrdom,” she told reporters. “My husband did this against the US invasion.”
She also told reporters that her husband could not have worked for the CIA because he was “too hostile to the United States to do this.” But he could have used the United States and Jordan for his interests, she added.
Bayrak, 30, met her husband while he was studying medicine in İstanbul. They married there in 2001 and moved to Jordan in 2002, when he graduated. “We had a routine life there; he was not someone who would go out often,” she said. “But I knew his inclinations.”
Several homegrown radical Muslim groups exist in Turkey, but al-Qaeda’s austere and violent interpretation of Islam receives little public support. Still, in 2003 al-Qaeda-linked militants killed 58 people in suicide attacks on two synagogues, a British bank and the British Consulate in İstanbul.
Bayrak, an Arabic-language translator for several pro-Islamic Turkish media outlets, said she was not surprised that her husband joined the jihad, since he often wrote on jihad Web sites when they lived in Jordan. She is the author of a book titled “Osama bin Laden: Che Guevara of the East,” and had translated into Turkish an anti-American book by Saddam Hussein titled “Begone, Demons.”
Bayrak said al-Balawi left for Pakistan on March 18, 2009, saying he was to become a surgical specialist. This has been disputed by anti-terrorism experts in the Middle East, who say he went to Afghanistan instead.
Jordanian intelligence officials have said they believed the devout 32-year-old doctor had been persuaded to support US efforts against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. They say al-Balawi was recruited to help capture or kill Ayman al-Zawahri, a doctor from Egypt who is bin Laden’s right-hand man, according to a counterterrorism official based in the Middle East.
Bayrak said her husband was detained in jail for three days by Jordanian intelligence in January last year. “They were about 20 men from the Jordanian intelligence, they raided our home late at night on Jan. 19,” she said. “They only searched our house randomly, they did not search it in detail. They took away my husband and seized his computer because my husband was writing on jihad forums.”
To his wife, he was an affectionate father of two young daughters, aged 5 and 7. “He never used force against us. ... I love him,” she said. She said her daughters were not aware of their father’s death. “I think I will wait until they grow up a bit before telling them, if they don’t discover it from the media,” she said. “They will miss their father but they’re fond of me, so I think I can manage.”
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