ISTANBUL, Nov 20: Fahrettin Calik was looking out of his office window when a truck loaded with explosives smashed through the British consulate gates opposite.

His left eye destroyed by flying glass, he now lies in an Istanbul hospital wondering if he will lose his sight entirely.

“The monster who did this will get their punishment in hell,” Fahrettin’s brother Murat Calik told Reuters.

The blast was the second of two that shattered the Istanbul morning on Thursday.

Only the columns of the Caliks’ dental products shop, where they have worked for 15 years, were left intact. Murat, 34, was thrown to the ground and his face torn by falling glass shards.

He said he helped his brother out through the carnage around the consulate, where British Consul Roger Short was among 13 people killed.

“I thought it was the end of the world. It was like an earthquake,” he said.

Fahrettin, 32, lay motionless surrounded by anxious family, one of seven patients in the eye department of the German Hospital in central Istanbul.

All, including one 38-year-old British man, were seriously hurt and in danger of being blinded. The heads of two of them were entirely wrapped in bandages.

About 30 more had already been treated and discharged.

At another nearby hospital in Taksim district, Graham Carter was unable to open his eyes because of bad facial burns.

A company director from the eastern English city of Lincoln, Carter was at the consulate picking up a visa for a friend when the blast went off.

“I saw a truck smash through the gates, then there was a big explosion inside,” he said, his left arm also heavily bandaged.

He remembers nothing else until he woke up in hospital.

Murat Calik was saddened by the death of Short, whom he used to greet in the busy streets of the central Beyoglu district.

“He was a good man, he would always say hello,” he said. “They say the people who did this are Islamic terrorists. But this has nothing to do with religion.”

14 consular staff dead: As many as 14 consular staff, including both British and Turkish nationals, were among the fatalities of Thursday’s suicide bomb attack on the British consulate in Istanbul, the Foreign Office said.

“As many as 14 staff working at or near the consulate-general have lost their lives,” a foreign office spokesman in London said, clarifying an earlier statement that all 14 dead were British nationals. —AFP