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Russia’s ambassador to Turkey was assassinated at an Ankara art exhibit on Monday evening by a lone Turkish gunman shouting “God is great!” and “don’t forget Aleppo, don’t forget Syria!” in what the leaders of Turkey and Russia called a provocative terrorist attack. New York Times reports.

The gunman, described by Turkish officials as a 22-year-old off-duty police officer, also wounded at least three others in the assault on the envoy, Andrey G. Karlov, which was captured on video. Turkish officials said the assailant was killed by other officers in a shootout.

The assassination, an embarrassing security failure in the Turkish capital, forced Turkey and Russia to confront a new crisis tied directly to the Syrian conflict, now in its sixth year.
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said on Russian television that Mr. Karlov had been “despicably killed” to sabotage ties with Turkey. Mr. Putin spoke with the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, by phone, and the two leaders agreed to cooperate in investigating the killing, and in combating terrorism broadly.

In an emergency meeting with Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov and other top officials, Mr. Putin said, “There can be only one answer to this — stepping up the fight against terrorism, and the bandits will feel this.”

Mr. Erdogan, in a speech late Monday night, said the assassination was a provocation meant to derail efforts by Turkey and Russia to collaborate more closely on regional issues and economic ties.

The assassination came after days of protests by Turks angry over Russia’s support for the Syrian government in the conflict and the Russian role in the killings and destruction in Aleppo, the northern Syrian city.

The Russian envoy was shot from behind and immediately fell to the floor while speaking at an exhibition of photographs, according to multiple accounts from the scene, the Contemporary Arts Center in the Cankaya area of Ankara.

Turkish officials said the gunman was killed after a shootout with Turkish Special Forces.

He was identified by Turkey’s interior minister as Mevlut Mert Altintas, from the western province of Aydin and a graduate of a police college in Izmir. Local news reports said that Mr. Altintas’s mother and sister had been arrested and that a computer had been confiscated from their house.

While it was too early to tell if the gunman acted alone, his use of jihadist slogans and his invocation of Syria raised the possibility that he was a member, or at least a sympathizer, of an Islamist group like Al Qaeda’s Syria affiliate or the Islamic State, two organizations that Turkey has been accused by allies, including the United States, of supporting in the past.