Video of Irish 'professional boxer' fighting Istanbul neighbourhood goes viral in Turkey
The fight appears to start over spilled drinks
A video purporting to show an Irish tourist in a mass brawl with shopkeepers in Istanbul is taking Turkish social media by storm.
In the footage, a man described by Turkish media as an “Irish boxer/tourist” can be seen in CCTV footage accidentally spilling a fridge full of bottles of water.
This sparks an argument, before a number of shopkeepers start hitting the unarmed tourist with sticks, chairs and other blunt items.
The tourist fights back and at one point knocks one man to the floor with a single punch. Towards the end of the video the tourist appears to continue to want to fight before he is eventually calmed down and led away.
The footage appeared on Haberturk TV on Tuesday night, and went viral on Turkish social media after it was posted to the channel’s Twitter feed, which has 500,000 followers.
The channel said the fight took place in the Istanbul neighbourhood of Aksaray, while a date stamp on the CCTV footage suggested it happened earlier this month.
The incident has attracted huge interest among Turkish Twitter users, and a source at the Irish consulate in Istanbul told The Independent that the “fun incident” had been tweeted about 75,000 times in Turkey in less than 24 hours.
He said the Irish national had been “attacked” by shopkeepers in Istanbul’s Aksaray district after he “accidentally knocked over the bottled waters stored in the cooler”.
“The shop owner overreacted and attacked the tourist with a stick,” he said. “The surprising thing is that the tourist turned out to be a pro boxer and knocked down the angry shopkeepers one by one.”
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