Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, told the Rossiya 24 news channel that Mr. Karlov had died of his wounds in what she described as a terrorist attack. Turkey’s Interior Ministry said the ambassador had died at Guven Hospital in Ankara.
Russian news agencies said the ambassador’s wife fainted and was hospitalized after learning of her husband’s death. They also said Russian tourists in Turkey had been advised against leaving their hotel rooms or visiting public places as a precaution.
Russia’s Tass news agency said Mr. Karlov had been shot from behind while finishing remarks at the opening of an art exhibition titled “Russia Through Turks’ Eyes.”
Mr. Karlov, who started his career as a diplomat in 1976, worked extensively in North Korea over two decades, before moving to the region in 2007, according to a biography on the Russian Embassy’s website. He became ambassador in July 2013.
The attack was a rare instance of an assassination of a Russian envoy. Historians said it might have been the first since Pyotr Voykov, a Soviet ambassador to Poland, was shot to death in Warsaw in 1927.
For many Russians, the assassination is likely to recall the 19th-century killing in Tehran of Aleksandr Griboyedov, a poet and diplomat who died after a mob stormed the Russian Embassy. That episode is remembered as the most severe insult to Russia’s diplomatic corps in the country’s history.
Photo
The gunman after shooting the Russian ambassador. CreditBurhan Ozbilici/Associated Press
More recently, the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah, now allied with Russia in Syria, kidnapped four Soviet diplomats in 1985, killing one and releasing three a month later.
The United States, which has tangled bitterly with Russia over the Syrian conflict, quickly condemned the assassination in Ankara. In a statement, Secretary of State John Kerry called it a “despicable attack, which was also an assault on the right of all diplomats to safely and securely advance and represent their nations around the world.”
Other prominent officials who often criticize Russia’s actions in Syria and elsewhere also offered their condolences. “No justification for such a heinous act,” Jens Stoltenberg, the secretary general of NATO, wrote on Twitter. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations said in a statement that he was “appalled by this senseless act of terror.”
The assassination also illustrated the long reach of the Syrian war. It has destabilized Europe with hundreds of thousands of refugees, spawned terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels, and led to the rise of the Islamic State, which controls territory across Iraq and Syria.
When the war began, Turkey was rising and confident, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, then its prime minister, began supporting rebels seeking the ouster of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. Entirely preoccupied with bringing Mr. Assad down, Turkey opened its borders to weapons and fighters flowing to the rebels, turning a blind eye, for a time, when the opposition turned increasingly Islamist.
As the war ground on, the consequences for Turkey were profound. It was overwhelmed with refugees — more than three million now reside in the country — and the rise of the Islamic State led to terrorist attacks within Turkey’s borders.
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