Istanbul, January 08: Turkish police will question the Turkish wife of the Jordanian suicide bomber who killed seven CIA agents at a US base in Afghanistan last month, Anatolia news agency reported on Friday.
Defne Bayrak, currently based in Istanbul, will be invited to the city’s anti-terror department to answer questions, unnamed police officials told the agency, without giving other details.
Bayrak’s husband Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, said to have been a double agent, blew himself up at a US military base in Khost near the Pakistani border on December 30, the deadliest attack against the CIA since 1983.
The couple married in 2001 in Istanbul, where Balawi had been studying medicine since 1995, and moved to Jordan the following year after Balawi graduated, Anatolia said.
Neither of them had criminal record in Turkey, it added.
Bayrak, based in Istanbul with her two daughters since October, said yesterday she did not believe her husband worked for any intelligence agency, describing him as “a man who would not even leave the house.”
She said that Balawi went to Pakistan to pursue medical studies and told his family he was planning to join them in Turkey.
Bayrak, who holds a degree in journalism, has written and translated books and penned articles for Islamist publications.
–Agencies