Turkey hides identity of internationally wanted terrorist… What is NATO related?

A Swedish website has revealed that Turkey is hiding the identity of a terrorist wanted by Interpol after he was arrested at the border, linking what happened to the NATO summit held yesterday in Brussels.

According to the Swedish website Nordic Monitor, the Turkish Defense Ministry tweeted on Sunday that border guards had arrested 12 people, including a member of a terrorist group wanted by Interpol in Hatay province, on the Syrian border, as the suspects were trying to enter the country illegally.

The Ministry did not share any information on the identity of the suspected terrorist and did not even identify which groups he belonged to, despite the fact that the person was on the INTERPOL wanted list.

A review by the Swedish website Nordic Monitor of previous announcements by the Ministry of Defense showed that even if the latter did not name suspects, it would declare the name of its terrorist group.

Interestingly, a camouflaged photo of one of the individuals was tweeted by the ministry, something Turkish security forces rarely do with suspected terrorists.

It was not clear whether the person in the picture was the same person as the person arrested.

Turkey’s state-run Anadolu Agency did not release the picture in its report, raising the possibility that the ministry may have used a symbolic photo.

Security experts contacted by the Nordic Monitor said that security forces may be hiding arrested suspects from the public in order to expand the scope of counterterrorism operations, but this does not appear to be the case in this example.

They pointed to a 2017 presidential decree that allowed Turkey’s National Intelligence Service to extradite suspects to another country or exchange them for people imprisoned or convicted in another country.

The Ministry of Defense may have announced that an individual wanted by Interpol was arrested to give the impression that the Turkish military was continuing to fight terrorists ahead of the NATO summit in Brussels this week, according to the Nordic Monitor.

An updated study by the Nordic Monitor suggests that over the past two months prior to the NATO summit, Turkish police have imprisoned at least 85 ISIS suspects in 12 cities, a higher number than in previous months.