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In any crisis the motto of the Turkish police is "arrest everybody," and in nabbing every living soul in the Pera Palace they did not omit to place under arrest the British Minister, whom they promptly released. In the confusion, however, instructions to take wounded Miss Ellis to the famed American Hospital of Istanbul were misunderstood and the dying British girl was taken to the German Hospital.
Out of the flaming Pera Palace, which burned for an hour before Istanbul firemen doused the blaze, darted Legation Clerk John Embury. He had suddenly remembered an extremely heavy and mysterious suitcase left with part of the Legation luggage at another hotel. This was one of two suitcases noticed on the tram from Sofia to Istanbul, opened and found to contain soiled clothing, some old Turkish newspapers and what looked like a big radio battery. The clerks could not find any Briton on the train to whom all these belonged, but they did not like to throw them away. Now Clerk Embury, with a hunch that the mysterious suitcase in his room contained an infernal machine, heaved it out the window onto an adjoining vacant lot. Turkish detectives cautiously opened the suitcase, found the "radio battery" to be a bomb.
The bombs had been carried into the British Legation train in Sofia—the private train of Bulgaria's Tsar Boris, loaned especially for the occasion—under the noses of Bulgarian detectives and Gestapo operatives who had been on duty for the previous twelve hours.
The British Legation staffers and Minister Rendel, moving on to the British Embassy and thence to Ankara, aired no theory about the explosion. Asked if they thought Nazi agents were to blame, they said, off the record, that this seemed to them "too fantastic to be probable."
"There is no doubt that the bombs were brought in the baggage of the British Legation from Sofia," said an official German spokesman in Berlin. "Most probably these were bombs which already had been set with time fuses to blow up bridges or cause other sabotage in Bulgaria. In the haste of packing, the British Legation officials forgot to remove the time fuses when they packed the bombs with their other baggage. . . . That just goes to show what happens when legations play around with explosives."