INTERVIEW — CLIFF MAY – President of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies
- Russian ambassador killed in Turkey. Mevlut Mert Altintas, a police officer who killed Russia’s ambassador to Turkey, could handle a firearm with ease. His first of multiple shots was a direct hit, piercing the back of Andrey Karlov as he spoke about the exhibit — a series of photographs of his homeland. The ambassador fell to the floor. Altintas circled his body, visibly agitated as he smashed photos hanging on the wall. After firing multiple rounds, the gunman shouted: “Allahu akbar (God is greatest). Do not forget Aleppo! Do not forget Syria! Do not forget Aleppo! Do not forget Syria!” “Only death will remove me from here. Everyone who has taken part in this oppression will one by one pay for it,” he said.
- Investigators said they suspect the driver of a truck that plowed into a crowd at a Berlin Christmas market, killing 12 people and injuring 48, did so in a deliberate terrorist attack, and Chancellor Angela Merkel said he may have been an asylum-seeker. The truck crashed into people gathered on Monday evening around wooden huts serving mulled wine and sausages at the foot of the Kaiser Wilhelm memorial church – left as a ruin after World War Two – in the heart of former West Berlin. A German security source said the suspect was a 23-year-old migrant from Pakistan known to police for committing minor offences. The source said the man had been staying at a refugee accommodation center in the now defunct Tempelhof airport. Merkel told reporters: “There is much we still do not know with sufficient certainty but we must, as things stand now, assume it was a terrorist attack.”
- Trump pins killings in Turkey, Germany on radical Islamic terrorism. President-elect Donald Trump blamed Islamic terrorism for deadly violence in Turkey and Germany on Monday and vowed to eradicate regional and global terror networks. Trump said the Islamic State group “and other Islamist terrorists continually slaughter Christians in their communities and places of worship as part of their global jihad.” Trump called the assassination of the Russian ambassador to Turkey at a photo exhibit “a violation of all rules of civilized order.” He added that a “radical Islamic terrorist” had assassinated the diplomat Adrew Karlov.
