A Turkish national succumbed to wounds he sustained during the mosque attacks in New Zealand in March, announced Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu on Thursday.
"Unfortunately, we have lost our citizen Zekeriya Tuyan who was seriously wounded in the treacherous terrorist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand,” he tweeted.
Tuyan was one of three Turkish citizens wounded in the March 15 attack by an Australian white supremacist gunman on two mosques. Tuyan's death raises the death toll in the attacks to 51.
Tuyan’s brother told Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news agency that Tuyan had been taken to surgery on Thursday, but that he could not be saved.
“He had surgery today, they couldn’t stop the bleeding so we lost him. We were happy because we thought it was going well, he had been battling for 50 days,” Yahya Tuyan said, according to Anadolu.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had strongly condemned the Christchurch attack and showed clips of a video taken by the gunman at election campaigns to denounce hatred against Islam.
Brenton Tarrant, 28, has been charged with 50 counts of murder for New Zealand’s worst peacetime mass shooting. Fifty other people were injured in the attacks, which occurred during Friday prayers.
