A 10-year-old girl dies after a uniformed student attacks an Istanbul middle school

Eslem Sare Bulut, 10, died in hospital after a student walked into a middle school in Istanbul's Başakşehir district on Tuesday morning and stabbed pupils. Seven other children were wounded. Turkey's interior ministry said the girl died despite every effort to save her, and that the other seven were in treatment. Security forces detained the attacker. Judicial proceedings have started.

Istanbul governor Davut Gül said the attacker was a female student from another school nearby. She entered Kayaşehir Şeyh İmam Hatip Middle School in the Kayabaşı neighbourhood wearing her own school uniform and stabbed students indiscriminately. Anadolu reported the time as about 8.40 am, 05.40 GMT. Footage posted through the morning showed ambulances at the gate and students outside. The ministry did not give the attacker's age or a motive.

Cumhuriyet, citing reporter Seyhan Avşar, later named the attacker by initials, F.M., and added claims that go beyond the official account and should be marked as claims. The paper said she had won a place at a science high school but enrolled at an Anatolian high school because the science school was far, and that her grade average was 96. It said she went to the middle school, the one closest to her home, in uniform, with a knife taken from home and hidden in a backpack. It also said she had joined Telegram groups about two weeks earlier in which school-attack material was circulating, and that she had told her mother she was targeted over her appearance and wanted to do something that would make the country notice her. Police have not confirmed the Telegram account, the grade average, or the conversation with her mother. Those details sit in one newspaper's sourcing until an indictment repeats them.

The confirmed core is enough to fix the crime. A student from a different school passed the gate of a middle school at the start of the day, in uniform, and stabbed children, one of whom was 10. Uniform is the detail that explains the entry. A girl in a school tunic at 8.40 am does not look like an intruder to a guard watching a rush of pupils. The school she chose was not her own. Gül said it was a nearby school. Cumhuriyet said it was the closest to her house. Either way, she did not attack classmates in her own corridor. She crossed to a younger school.

Turkey has had a year of school attacks that make this one read as part of a run rather than as a single shock. In April a student opened fire at a school in Kahramanmaraş and killed 11 people, including a teacher, before dying himself. That was a rare school shooting in a country where guns are harder to carry into a campus than a kitchen knife. Tuesday's weapon was a knife, which is why the gate check that might stop a firearm did not stop this. Seven wounded and one dead from a blade, in the first minutes of a school day, is a casualty list produced before teachers could reach the corridor.

Başakşehir is a large outer district on the European side, with new housing estates and a cluster of religious-curriculum middle schools of the imam hatip type. Kayaşehir Şeyh İmam Hatip is one of them. The curriculum is not, on anything released so far, part of the motive. The attacker came from a different school. What the district can change quickly is the morning gate: whether a uniform from another campus is waved through, and whether bags are opened. Gül's description, that she entered in uniform and stabbed at random, is the sentence a security review has to answer.

The interior ministry has the suspect in custody and has started the judicial file. It has not published an age. If she is under 18, the case moves under the juvenile rules, which cap sentences and change how long she can be held before charge. That legal fork is the next public fact. Until the indictment, the death that is certain is Eslem Sare Bulut's, at 10, after an 8.40 am attack that also wounded seven other pupils at a middle school she attended and the attacker did not.