On Dec. 19, Mevlut Mert Altintas, a 22-year-old riot squad police officer, shot and killed the Russian ambassador to Turkey. As in other parts of the world, the assassination in Ankara also made it to the front pages of many Iranian newspapers.

Indeed, in Iran, both Reformist and conservative newspapers slammed Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for his regional policies while commending Russian President Vladimir Putin for his “wise” position after the assassination.

Under the headline “Planning in Washington, Pulling the Trigger in Ankara,” the hard-line Kayhan daily linked the assassination to the Dec. 20 trilateral meeting in Moscow between Iran, Turkey and Russia.

Kayhan wrote Dec. 21, “Following the liberation of Aleppo, which delivered a heavy blow to the terrorists, Erdogan thought of changing his position toward Russia and Iran again. It was during this period that it was initially announced that officials of Moscow and Ankara have restarted talks on Syria, and then the news was aired that Sergey Lavrov, Mevlut Cavusoglu and Mohammad Javad Zarif, the foreign ministers of Russia, Turkey and Iran, were supposed to talk about Syria in Moscow on Tuesday [Dec. 20]. But one day before the summit in Moscow, Andrei Karlov, the Russian ambassador to Turkey, was assassinated in front of TV cameras in order to make everything fall apart and return to square one.“