There have been further attacks on elderly Armenian women in Istanbul.

Bianet reports that Sultan Aykar, an 83 year-old Armenian woman was attacked January 22 in Istanbul’s Samatya district, leaving her blind in one eye.  As we noted January 16, there have been three other attacks on elderly Armenian women in Istanbul’s Samatya neighborhood, where Armenian women were either killed, severely battered or attempted to be kidnapped.

With no arrests and the police giving little information regarding the cases, there is still no way of knowing whether or not these are hate crimes.  Yet the concern that Armenians are being specifically targeted is growing [link in Turkish].  Writing in Today’s Zaman, Nicole Pope writes,  “Can it be a coincidence that on four occasions in the past few weeks, elderly women living on their own — all of them of Armenian descent — were targeted in brutal attacks?”