A mosque in the southeastern Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, where 80 civilians were taking shelter, has been shelled by Russian forces, Ukraine’s foreign ministry said on Saturday.
“The mosque of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent and his wife Roxolana (Hurrem Sultan) in Mariupol was shelled by Russian invaders. More than 80 adults and children are hiding there from the shelling, including citizens of Turkey,” the ministry wrote on its Twitter account.
It did not specify when the shelling took place.
However, the Ukrainian embassy in Ankara told AFP it had alerted Turkey’s foreign ministry to the attack, without specifying when or whether it had received any response.
On Monday, the Turkish consulate in the southern port of Odessa had issued a tweet urging Turkish citizens to take shelter in the mosque “with a view to be being evacuated” to Turkey.
The consulate could not be reached by AFP on Saturday.
On Friday, the Ukrainian embassy in Turkey had forwarded to journalists a Facebook post by Mariupol’s deputy mayor, Petro Andryushchenko, who said: “Right now, 86 Turkish citizens are being covered in the mosque territory. Thirty-four of them are kids.”
Friends and relatives of Turks living in Mariupol said they were anxious.
“My brother, Sahin Beytemur, has been living in Mariupol for eight years … We haven’t heard from him since last Saturday,” the 38-year-old shopkeeper’s sister told AFP.
Others took to social media to try to locate the whereabouts of their loved ones.
“We have not heard from my aunt and cousin who have been living there for 11 days. We have no idea whether they are alive or not. Communication is completely lost we don’t know what to do,” wrote one Twitter user, @brsyrdm11. Turkey is a close ally of Ukraine but has refused to cut ties with Moscow and even tried to mediate between the two sides, hosting a first meeting of the Russian and Ukrainian foreign ministers on Thursday in Antalya.
