Turkish police have arrested four people in connection with the murder of an Arab-Israeli businessman, although the perpetrators appear to have already fled abroad, Turkish media reported Tuesday.
Businessman Anas El Kadir, 30, an Arab with Israeli citizenship who owned a car sales and real estate company in Istanbul, frequently visited Israel with his family, his father, Bilal Abdulkadir, told Turkey’s Anadolu Agency.
Several people shot at the car El Kadir was traveling in in central Istanbul on Sunday night, causing him to flee and take refuge in a nearby store, where the assailants followed and killed him, NTV reported.
A friend of the businessman, also an Arab Israeli, and a Turkish bodyguard were also seriously injured in the attack.
The father of the murdered man has ruled out any political motive for the attack and the police are assuming that it was a settling of scores, the aforementioned station points out.
The police have arrested four people suspected of having contributed to the crime, but believe that the alleged killers fled abroad via the Bulgarian border.
Murders committed by hitmen are not uncommon in the organized crime world in Turkey, a country in which local crime families and several European mafias have their networks, although the presence of these networks has diminished in recent decades.
