Turkey "rejected Russia's request to not perform autopsy on slain envoy"

PanARMENIAN.Net - Turkey rejected the Russian government’s urgent request not to conduct an autopsy on the body of slain Russian Ambassador Andrei Karlov, who was gunned down by a Turkish police officer linked to jihadist groups.

According to an internal government communiqué obtained by Nordic Monitor, the Russian Embassy sent an urgent diplomatic note to the Turkish Foreign Ministry on December 20, 2016, a day after the Russian envoy’s assassination. The note stated that the ambassador’s grieving widow, Marina Mihaylovna Karlova, married to him for 45 years, did not want a Turkish medical examiner to perform the autopsy on her husband’s body, signaling that the Russian government wanted to keep the body intact and take the first look at it as part of its own investigation.

However, the Turkish authorities decided to reject the Russian government’s request. The ambassador’s body, first taken to the Private Ankara Güven Hospital from the crime scene, was sent to the Council of Forensic Medicine in Ankara.

The detailed autopsy, done despite objections from the Russians, stated that Karlov died as a result of multiple gunshot wounds that caused fatal damage to the heart, lungs and spinal cord, resulting in severe massive internal and external bleeding and traumatic shock. The gunman put six bullets in Karlov’s head, neck, back, abdomen, chest and midriff. Only one bullet was recovered from his body, while the others went through. He was dead within five minutes of the shooting.

Turkey also turned down a Russian government request to run a lie detector test on a key suspect whom Turkey claimed to be complicit in the assassination. The rejection by Turkey came despite the fact that the suspect, Mustafa Timur Özkan, who repeatedly said he had nothing to do with the murder, volunteered to undergo the Russian government’s lie detector test, eager to prove his innocence.