It was around 7 pm on 9th of October 2022 when I heard an explosion from a distance. I was home when I heard it and although the sound of the effect didn't feel like it is close to my , I knew it was somewhere close to my neighborhood. A few minutes after I heard the explosion, my cousin, who lives in the same neighborhood as me but on another street, sent me pictures which he took from his balcony overlooking Fikirtepe, another neighborhood that is close to the one me and my cousin live in. I immediately got my camera after seeing the pictures and rushed to the site.

When I got there the fire was almost put out but the building was still smoking. I asked some questions to the people who live there while taking pictures but none knew what really happened. All they knew was that a family and an Ozbek man, friend of the family, lived on the top floor of the apartment where the explosion happened. Most people on the site including myself assumed that it was a gas leak accident. However the story was all different.

According to the news a family of two, a father and a daughter who are Turkish, was living on the top floor where the explosion happened. It turned out that the father had links to a terrorist organisation who was their expert on explosions. Furthermore in 1998 members of that terrorist group including the father carried out a gun attack in Bern, Switzerland killing 4 people. After fleeing to Turkey the father got caught by the officials and sentenced to life imprisonment in 2012. Some sources claim that it was his wife who spoke to the police and had him arrested. However, in 2019 due to his health problems the father was released. Up until this point the story is pretty straight forward but this is where it gets deeper and gets strange. According to some neighbors and sources, the father was planning a revenge to kill his wife for getting him arrested so he started making bombs in his house. Even though this information is not fully confirmed an Uzbek man who was a friend of the father, also suspected of having links with terrorist organisations, and who survived the explosion by jumping out of a window, said that the father was planning to kill his wife. Being the survivor, the Uzbek man later got caught by the police after the explosion and told them that the father also had some suicidal tendencies and the cause of the explosion was an accident. According to the Uzbek man, while the father was preparing the bombs something went wrong and the gunpowder ignited then the explosion happened. In addition to this, the father's ten year old daughter also died in the explosion. 

Even if the mayor of Istanbul announced that the incident is not related to terrorism it begs the question why most of the articles or sources disappeared from the internet 7 months later or was the father really seeking revenge or was there a bigger plot behind all this which ended with a mere accident...