Bilindahî

[Jay]

Aska left the apartment at half past eight. The street was ordinary. A fruit seller arranging crates. A tea house, plastic chairs still stacked from the night before. A man with a hose working the pavement outside a butcher's, the water running dark into the gutter. She walked east. The bag strap had been cutting into her shoulder since she left. She hadn't adjusted it.

Ulus opened up ahead. Wide pavements, older stone, the kind of street that moved people in one direction whether they intended it or not. She had walked the route twice before. Both times without the bag.

At the corner of Anafartalar she stopped at a cassette display. Her eyes went to the glass front of the stall. The street behind her, bent and compressed in the reflection. A woman. Two men. A boy on a bicycle. She looked at her watch and realized she needed to move on.
The shopping centre was four minutes away at this pace. Just as she looked back up a woman with a pushchair cut across her path. Aska stopped short. One hand went to the strap. She let it go and kept walking.

Near the underpass the foot traffic thickened around a bus discharging passengers. She moved through them. Her right hand had gone numb and she flexed it once at her side, slowly, without breaking stride. She was worried she’d miss the target position. Their insider said the convoy would only pass once within a 10 minute period.

Just then a squad car came from her left. No siren. It decelerated and pulled to the kerb fifteen metres ahead, directly on her approach, and sat there with the engine running.
Aska almost paused but her training kicked in. She walked three more steps. Four. Then she turned left.

A narrower street came in front of her Hardware shop. Shuttered clothing stall with a broken shutter rail hanging loose. She did not increase her pace. She made herself believe that.

Two more turns. South. Then west.

She stopped inside the entrance of a covered market and put her back against a stone pillar. Around her the stalls ran deep into the building, loud with vendors and transistor radios and the smell of cardamom and burnt sugar. She set the bag down between her feet and stood with her arms loose at her sides.

She stayed there. Eight minutes. Maybe nine. The convoy should have come by now. She began to panic.

The two officers came up the far pavement in a loose spread, not quite side by side, checking faces as they moved. No urgency to it. The near one wore his weapon low on his hip. They reached the end of the street, turned, and were gone.

Aska did not move. Fuck she thought. She felt her body getting warm as the convoy hadn’t appeared. The police officers were getting closer. Aska looked around and moved her leg.

A loud explosion erupted from her bag. The explosion took out the facing wall of the shopping centre.

The glass around the stores cracked open sending the whole frontage outward in the street. Shrapnel hitting dozens nearby. A woman next to Aska was blown immediately from the blast. A man against the far wall of the street sat down hard on the pavement and did not get up. The fruit stall on the corner ceased to exist. A puff of red mist whether of the fruits or people popped like confetti. Where the seller had been there was wreckage and a red smear across the lower half of a concrete pillar. Three others nearby had their limbs thrown apart as the force from the blast threw them against the walls.

The sound rolled out and bounced off the surrounding buildings and then there was a moment of total silence before the screaming started. Car alarms up the length of Anafartalar. A fire began somewhere inside the center with black smoke beginning to climb. Dust still moving in the air, pale and granular, settling on the bodies in the street. People rushed in to help as they found a dozen or so injured people.

The first ambulance arrived in eleven minutes.

The crew worked fast. The paramedic triaged by moving, crouching, moving, crouching again, touching throats, checking pupils, marking the unconscious with a strip of tape on the wrist. Her partner bagged a man whose face had been opened by glass. They loaded three in the first run.

​

By the time the second unit arrived there were already civilians in the street doing what they could, which was not much. A shopkeeper had torn his apron into strips. An older man was holding a boy's hand and talking to him steadily about nothing as the kid cried from the piece of glass stuck in his leg..

The fire brigade arrived and ran hoses into the center’s ground floor. The fire was small. It mattered less than the structure, part of the frontage had come away from its frame and was leaning at an angle that would not hold.

The jandarma sealed the perimeter in sectors allowing emergency workers to operate but keeping the public out.

They worked outward from the blast point, forty metres, then eighty, pushing civilians back with arms spread, not shouting. A sergeant coordinated by hand signals from the centre of the intersection. His radio was going constantly. He answered in short bursts and kept moving.

By the time the perimeter was set, six of the wounded had been moved to Ankara Numune. Two others were on the ground still waiting. A third had been covered with a coat by a civilian and left where he was.

Detective Yılmaz got the call at his desk.

He drove himself. No blues, no siren. He parked on a side street three blocks out and walked the rest of the way, badging through the outer cordon to a growing crowd of onlookers.

At the blast point he stopped.

He stood there for a moment, hands in his jacket pockets, and looked at it. The pattern of the debris. The direction the glass had blown. The scorch mark on the pavement — not large, not the crater you got from a vehicle device or a planted charge. Compact. Central.

A jandarma captain named Demir came and stood beside him.

"The sense we are getting is this was a gas main going off," Demir said.

Yılmaz looked at the scorch mark. The radius of it. The way the damage concentrated outward from a single low point at street level rather than upward from below.
"No," he said. He walked around.

Demir was quiet for a moment. "The shopping center’s management is saying a boiler. It was supposed to be repaired but the guy never showed up."

Yılmaz crouched down. On the edge of the scorch, half-buried under a piece of shop frontage, there was a piece of material. Dark fabric, fused at one edge. He didn't touch it. He looked at it for a few seconds and then stood back up.

"Where's your forensics team?" Yılmaz asked.

"Twenty minutes." Demir responded looking down at his radio.

He looked up the street, then back at the blast point. "And nobody moves anything."

Demir followed his eyeline. "You think…"

"I think nobody moves anything." The detective said, taking in the whole situation.

 

[Jay]

Yılmaz walked the perimeter of the debris field slowly, hands still in his pockets. A journalist had gotten inside the outer cordon somehow, and a patrolman was moving him back. Yılmaz watched that for a second, then looked away. He always wondered how journalists make it to crime scenes before law enforcement.

The smoke from inside the center had thinned. On the pavement, six metres from the blast point he saw one shoe. Brown leather, likely a man's, still intact. No sign of its pair.

He took out a notebook and wrote down the time. He looked at it for a long time.

A patrolman named Gürbüz came and stood at his shoulder.

"Could be a gas main," Gürbüz said. "The building's old."

Demir said nothing as he watched Yılmaz walk the perimeter. "The center’s facilities manager is saying a boiler in the…" The patrolman continued. "Look at the scorch."

"A boiler blows upward," Yılmaz said. "A main blows outward from the wall. This is from the pavement." He pointed without touching anything. "From street level. Low. Something that was being carried. Look at the way the bodies were thrown." He pointed to the blood marks on the ground. The explosion propelled them outwards in four main directions. He said now standing where he thought the blast had originated.

“A gas main blows upwards and spreads out from there. It wouldn’t have sent bodies like this.”

Gürbüz was quiet but Demir finally put it together.

"Get me EOD and get me TvOS," Demir said. "Now. And like I said. Don't touch anything between here and the pillar. Unless you want to end up like them." He nodded to the carcass of a bystander left behind by the blast. Yılmaz nodded in agreement.

The EOD team arrived from the Ankara jandarma garrison in seventeen minutes.

They came in two vehicles. The senior technician, a warrant officer named Çelik, suited up at the vehicle and walked the perimeter before he went near the blast point. He moved slowly, placing his feet deliberately, scanning the ground. At the edge of the primary debris field, he crouched and stayed there for almost four minutes.

Demir watched from the cordon.

Çelik stood, walked back, and pulled off his helmet.

"It's clear," he said. "Secondary device, if there was one, would have gone by now."

"What was it?"

Çelik looked back at the blast point. "Plastic explosive. The burn pattern and the fragmentation spread means it was something carried. Not planted." He paused. "The crater's shallow. Concentrated. Whatever it was, it was at roughly waist height when it went."

"Carried how."

"Vest, bag, belt, I can't tell you yet." He nodded toward a section of debris near the pillar. "There's material over there I haven't touched. And I need to see what's left of the primary. If there's enough of it."

"There's fabric near the pillar."

Çelik put his helmet back on. "I'll need twenty minutes."

The TvOS team arrived as the EOD officers were growing through the bomb residue and checking for secondaries. The lead investigator was a woman named Soylu, late thirties, dark coat, a document case under one arm. She showed her badge to get through the cordon without slowing and went straight to Demir.

Demir saluted her. “We’ve secured everything from the blast point to the pillar. Nobody's been inside that line except EOD."

She looked at the blast point. Then at the pillar. Then at the debris field between them.

"What about the CCTV?" She asked looking for a camera.

"The center’s system is down. There's a PTT branch on the corner where we're pulling their exterior camera. Traffic camera at the Anafartalar junction, but the angle may not cover the pavement."

"Municipality cameras?"

"Working on it."

She nodded once and turned to the two technicians who had followed her in. "Grid it."

They set to work immediately, photographing first, systematically, quadrant by quadrant, before any collection began. One technician placed numbered yellow markers at intervals across the debris field while the other shot from multiple angles and heights. They worked without speaking to each other.

Soylu walked the perimeter of the debris field with Demir.

"Do we have any witnesses?"

"Seventeen taken so far. Mostly shoppers who were inside or near the entrance. Three street vendors. One traffic warden who was at the junction."

"Anyone who was outside, close, before it went?"

"One. A man from the tea house across the street. Says he was setting out chairs. He's at Numune glass in his shoulder. He was rumbling something about a woman."

"I’m heading over there now. Tell me as soon as we get that CCTV footage."

The forensic collection took three hours.

The technicians worked inward from the perimeter, bagging and tagging everything above a certain size threshold. Fabric fragments. Metal fragments. Glass with directional fracture patterns. Organic material, several pieces of it, some still identifiable, most not, each photographed in place before collection, GPS-tagged, sealed.

Near the pillar, the piece of dark fabric Yılmaz had noted earlier was collected and bagged as item fourteen. Beneath it, partially protected from the secondary blast by the fallen shop frontage, was a section of nylon webbing with a metal buckle. The buckle had partially melted on one side. The webbing was intact.

Çelik photographed it and called Soylu over.

"Harness," he said.

She crouched. "Load-bearing?"

"The webbing width, the buckle type, yes. Not a bag strap." He indicated the direction the webbing ran. "It was worn against the body."

She stood. "So we had a vest-carrier."

"There was a lot of wiring," Çelik said. "Branching, multiple initiation points. That's consistent with charges sewn across a garment. A bag device is usually wired to one point."

Yılmaz walked over and shook his head. "I think it was a bag."

Soylu straightened to look at him. "What gives you that impression?"

"The wiring, I don't argue with. It might mean a vest. But look at the seat of it." He pointed at the collapsed wall, then at the scorch pattern radiating across the floor from a point near the base. "Everything throws outward from there. Ground level, off the wall. If this were worn, the seat's at chest height and the throw pattern's centered on a body."

"Bodies get thrown too," Soylu said.

"They do. But look at the buckle." He crouched beside the evidence bag. "Melted on one face only. If it's strapped around a torso, the orientation changes with the body — you'd expect uneven scorching, maybe both faces touched at different points. This is consistent with something sitting still against a surface when it went."

Çelik frowned at it. "Or pinned against the pillar as the body fell."

"Possible," Yılmaz allowed. "I'm not closing the door on a vest. I'm saying the floor doesn't read like a person standing at the center of this."

Soylu looked between the two men, then back at the debris field. "What about the remains? Trauma pattern would settle it faster than any of this."

"Forensics is still working the south end," Çelik said. "If we get torso devastation with relatively intact lower legs on one set of remains, that's about as close to a signature as a vest gets."

"And if it's spread evenly across multiple victims, distance-based, no single body absorbing the brunt — that's a bag," Yılmaz said.

"So we wait on the post-mortem."

"And the swabs," Çelik added, holding up the bagged webbing. "Residue's going to sit differently depending on which face was against skin and which was against air, or lining. Lab can tell us that tonight."

Soylu exhaled through her nose. "So we have a wired harness with a melted buckle, sitting on top of a floor that says it never moved, and we won't know which one of you is right until the morgue and the lab both call back."

"That's the name of the game," Yılmaz said.

She didn't smile. "Bag it. Get the swabs prioritized. Either way we all agree this was a terror attack and not a gas main explosion. She said walking away to the pathology tea. "

The pathology team worked a grid of their own, separate from forensics.

There were four dead on the scene. Three more had been moved to Numune before the perimeter was fully set. The pathologist, a thin man named Dr. Erdoğan who had driven from the university hospital, moved between the covered bodies with a clipboard and a handheld recorder.

At the edge of the blast point, in the area of highest thermal damage, he found what remained of the primary. He recorded his observations without inflection. Fragmentation injuries inconsistent with proximity to a planted device. Thermal burns concentrated on the torso and upper legs. Blast damage to the lower extremities severe and asymmetric in a pattern consistent with the device having been located on the body rather than adjacent to it.

He flagged the remains for priority transport and spoke briefly to Soylu before leaving. She wrote two words in her notebook. Body-borne.

Detective Yılmaz had been there since the first hour. He had done what he always did at a scene, walked it, looked at it, said nothing. While Soylu's team gridded the blast point, he walked the wider area. The surrounding streets. The approach routes. He went into the covered market two streets west and stood in the entrance for a minute, looking at the stone pillar, the sightlines, the exits.

He came back to the cordon and found Demir.

"The PTT camera," he said.

"We're pulling the footage now."

"And the hospital, anyone presenting with minor injuries? Burns, tinnitus, lacerations they didn't want to explain?"
Demir looked at him. "I'll make the calls."

Yılmaz nodded and looked back at the blast point. Soylu's technicians were finishing the grid. The numbered markers stood in rows across the debris like a small yellow field.

"Then there's a body in pieces somewhere inside that perimeter that isn't one of ours." He meant the victims. "And there may be someone else who walked away."

Demir said nothing for a moment.

"The squad car," he said. "The one that stopped on Anafartalar before it went. The crew reported a pedestrian who turned off before the junction. They didn't think anything of it."

Yılmaz looked at him.

"A woman," Demir said. "Bag over one shoulder. Turned left toward the market streets."

Yılmaz nodded. "Let’s wait and see. What the CCTV footage shows. Tell them to hurry that shit up."