Ankara: Turkey said on Wednesday it had identified the gunman behind the New Year’s massacre on an elite Istanbul nightclub that killed 39, as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned the attack aimed to polarise Turkish society.

The assailant stormed the glamorous Reina nightclub on the Bosphorus early on Sunday morning, spraying 120 bullets at terrified partygoers celebrating the start of 2017.

Of the 39 dead, 27 were foreigners including citizens from Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Jordan, Iraq, Tunisia and Morocco.

At least 36 people have now been detained in the probe, but the gunman himself remains on the run after slipping into the night following the attack.

“The identity of the person responsible for the attack has been established,” Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said during an interview with state-run Anadolu news agency, without giving any name.

The attack was claimed by the IS, with reports suggesting the authorities suspect the gunman may be from either Kyrgyzstan or Uzbekistan, both ex-Soviet states.

“Efforts to capture him continue,” said Cavusoglu, adding that the house the suspect lived in “has been searched” and that the attack he mounted had been “professionally” planned.

In the western city of Izmir, at least 20 people including 11 women were taken into custody as part of the investigation into the attack, Anadolu reported.

The news agency said they were of Central Asian and Syrian origin while Dogan news agency said they were members of three families.

It was alleged that some of those detained had been living in the house with the suspected attacker in Konya.

The new arrests bring the number of those detained to at least 36, including two foreigners detained by Turkish police at Istanbul’s main airport on Tuesday.

One of them was reportedly a woman suspected of being his wife with whom he had stayed in Konya along with two children.

Dogan news agency quoted her as saying she was not aware of the attack until it was reported.

On Wednesday, the Haberturk daily said that during his getaway, the gunman took a taxi to a Uighur restaurant in the city’s Zeytinburnu district where he got out and went inside to get money from someone to pay the fare.

The restaurant owner told the paper that police had since detained seven of his workers — all of them Turkic Uighurs from the Xinjiang region of China — but that he did not know the attacker himself.

Published in Dawn, January 5th, 2017