Turkey Arrests Islamic State-Linked Suspect Working at Nuclear Plant Site

Police in Mersin, Turkey, confirmed on Tuesday that they had arrested an unnamed man working at the construction site of the Russian-built Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant in connection with an investigation into the Islamic State.

According to a translation of a Mersin police statement by the Turkish outlet Duvar, authorities said that the person in question was an employee at the future nuclear power plant site and had obtained work there using a false identity. The person was identified only by the initials “U.A.” and allegedly found to be a Russian citizen, though some reports conflict with that information and state that his nationality remains publicly unknown.

Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear power company, is in charge of the construction of the Akkuyu facility. Once completed, it will be Turkey’s first nuclear power plant. Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has celebrated the project as elevating Turkey’s geopolitical profile by allowing it to enter the “club” of nuclear-capable states and the plant as boasting state-of-the-art security features.

The police announcement of the Islamic State-linked detention on Tuesday included photos of the man being arrested, but no specifics on why, aside from the use of fake identification, he was detained or what kind of criminal charges he may face. It is unclear at press time what the man’s job was at the Akkuyu site. Police also did not directly state if the man was believed to be a member of the Islamic State, only that his arrest occurred “within the scope of the work carried out by our Intelligence and Counter-Terrorism Branch Directorates” against the Islamic State.

The arrest has raised alarm in Turkey, which experienced its first terrorist attack attributed to the Islamic State in seven years in late January. Two terrorists opened fire on Catholics congregating for Mass in Istanbul’s Santa Maria Church on January 28, killing one person. Eyewitnesses said the low death count appeared to be in part the result of at least one of the guns used in the attack jamming.

The Islamic State’s Amaq “news agency” confirmed that the attackers belonged to the Sunni jihadist terrorist group, applauding them for having “attacked a gathering of Christian unbelievers during their polytheistic ceremony.”

Turkish authorities identified the two gunmen as citizens of Russia and Tajikistan and subsequently engaged in police raids against individuals suspected of having played a role in the attack. Turkish police announced on January 30 that they had arrested 47 people as a result of investigations into the church shooting. As of last week, the number of people arrested for alleged ties to the Islamic State in Turkey has risen to 147.

Prior to the shooting in January, Turkey’s most recent Islamic State terrorist attack occurred on the New Year’s Eve welcoming 2017. An Islamic State terrorist later identified as Usbek national Abdulkadir Masharipov stormed Istanbul’s Reina nightclub during one of its busiest nights and opened first, killing 39 people and injuring dozens of others. Masharipov reportedly confessed to the shooting.

The Reina nightclub attack occurred a little less than six months after the 2016 bombing of Istanbul’s Atatürk Airport. Unlike the nightclub shooting, no individual or group ever took responsibility for the attack, later described as a triple suicide bombing, but Turkish police said evidence indicated that it was an Islamic State operation.

While Turkey had not experienced any mass-casualty Islamic State terrorist attacks since 2017, Turkish officials consistently described the group as a threat and occasionally announced operations against suspected jihadists. A month before the Istanbul church shooting, the Turkish Interior Ministry announced that it had detained 304 people in a wave of police raids nationwide, all suspected of some association with the Islamic State.

The arrest on Tuesday has raised concerns about a potential terrorist attack targeting the nuclear power plant site, which has been plagued by setbacks and controversy for nearly a decade and technically conceived of almost half a century ago. Turkish authorities first issued a license to build a nuclear energy facility at the site in 1976 but reconsidered the project following the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, according to the Associated Press. Turkey first held a groundbreaking ceremony at the Akkuyu site in 2015 and claimed that Rosatom would complete the project by at the earliest 2022.

Shortly after the announcement of construction beginning, the Turkish military shot down a Russian warplane over Syria, chilling relations between the two countries and prompting global concern that Erdogan had inadvertently dragged NATO, of which Turkey is a member, into conflict with Russia. Ankara and Moscow ultimately resolved the tensions — stemming from Russia’s support of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, whose regime Erdogan had at one time promised to “end” — and Erdogan announced the groundbreaking of Akkuyu for a second time in 2018.

Construction continued quietly, with the exception of protests from anti-nuclear power activists, for years, but 2022 came and went without completion of the plant. In early 2023, Turkey experienced one of the worst natural disasters in its history: a series of earthquakes that killed upwards of 40,000 people near the border with Syria. The earthquakes renewed anxiety surrounding Akkuyu, which is located about 200 miles from the epicenter of the largest of the earthquakes. Authorities insisted, however, that the power plant was being built with protective measures to keep it safe and operational in the face of much larger tremors than those experienced in 2023 in the region.

Erdogan held a virtual press conference with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin in April 2023 to “inaugurate” the plant, celebrating the first nuclear fuel entering a reactor at the site.

The head of Rosatom, Andrei Likhachev, said at the time that the company expects the plant to be fully operational by 2025.

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