 and the Hatay Police Department, the state-run Anadolu news agency reported.){kind=link}
One of the alleged masterminds of a terrorist attack in southern Turkey in 2013 has been captured in Syria in a joint operation conducted by the National Intelligence Organization (MIT) and the Hatay Police Department, the state-run Anadolu news agency reported.
Muhammed Dib Korali, a Syrian national who was one of the alleged masterminds of the May 2013 attack in the Reyhanlı district of Hatay, was left in the custody of the Hatay police, Anadolu reported.
Reyhanlı, a town of 64,000 people near the Syrian border, was hit by two car bombings that killed 53 people.
The Turkish government at the time held al-Mukhabarat, the Syrian intelligence organization of the now ousted regime of Bashar al-Assad, responsible for the attack, one of the deadliest in Turkey’s history.
The Syrian government denied responsibility for the attacks.
Korali is accused of having supplied the bombs used in the explosions, which damaged 912 buildings, 891 workplaces and 148 vehicles in Reyhanlı.
In February 2018 a Turkish court sentenced nine of 33 suspects to aggravated life and 13 others to between 10 and 15 years in prison in a trial related to the Reyhanlı bombings.
According to the indictment Korali, who went by the codename “Abu Cüneyt,” took part in organizing the perpetrators of the Reyhanlı attack and established contact with Nasır Eskiocak, who would manage the Turkish leg of the planning carried out in late 2012.
The capture of Korali comes shortly after the ouster of the Assad regime by an alliance of rebel forces in Syria on December 8.
Since the start of the civil war in Syria, Turkey has backed rebel groups in the country and severed relations with the Assad regime. Although the country sought to normalize relations with Assad over the past year, the normalization never materialized.
MİT also captured another key suspect, Yusuf Nazik, of the Reyhanlı attack in the Syrian port city of Latakia in 2018.
Nazik confessed that on a tipoff from Syrian intelligence he scouted the crime scene prior to the attack and moved explosives from Syria to Turkey in two vehicles he had procured.
Nazik, who was born in the Antakya district of Hatay province, admitted he was acting on orders from Syrian intelligence.
He was handed down 53 aggravated life sentences for his role in the attack.