The story is that a lone gunman entered the Reina nightclub in the upscale Ortaköy neighbourhood of Istanbul at around 1.45am on January the 1st and murdered at least 39, wounding a further 69 of the nightclub patrons before changing from the black attire he was wearing when he arrived into an all white outfit and evading all the Turkish security forces making a clean escape from the scene.

...

This event was reported as a real attack around the world but it was not.

The presence of fake victims around an event strongly implies that the event was not authentic because if there were real victims from a real tragedy there would be no need for them.

So while, given the scale of the attack, the wide variety of victims nationalities and the near universal credulity with which the story was greeted make it seem ludicrous at face value to suggest this attack was a work of fiction, a non-event, the weight of currently available evidence points overwhelmingly in that direction.

In many ways it scarcely matters, the more important question is who is behind these events? Who benefits and what are they hoping to achieve?

The militant groups against whom these crimes are attributed gain absolutely nothing. They make their destruction imperative.

Turkey and it’s leader have recently crossed the West, their decision to participate in a Syrian peace process that included Russia and Iran and excluded the US will be seen as an unfriendly act in the US and give the US a motive to destabilise Turkey.

But given that the Istanbul police are handling this case it is hard to imagine any outsiders exerting sufficient influence over the police to pull this event off. It is possible but seems highly unlikely.

On the other hand the high number of foreign victims also seemingly makes it impossible for this deception to have been concocted locally.

Many credible analysts stated that the slaying of the Russian Ambassador in Ankara was a fraud, my understanding is that the assassination was a staged event but the killing of Andrei Karlov was real and perhaps this event will ultimately also turn out to have been authentic and there are signs of authenticity such as what seems to be a corpse laying in the Istanbul street and the start of the attack also appears somewhat authentic, possible spark hits aside.

However the tentative conclusion remains that this event was fiction and the authors were most likely elements within the Turkish state.