The attack on the Mavi Çarşı was methodical and brutal. Three assailants entered the shopping center, poured petroleum on the ground floor and set it alight with Molotov cocktails, driving survivors upward through the building. The fire burned upward, as fires do, consuming each floor in succession. The flames engulfed the five-story structure, shattering windows and sending smoke pouring into the street. Survivors on upper floors, cut off from the staircases below, were overcome by fumes in spaces with no ventilation. Search-and-rescue teams worked through the wreckage in the aftermath. The final toll was thirteen dead.

The attack was attributed to the Kurdistan Workers' Party, the PKK, which had been conducting an armed campaign against the Turkish state since 1984. Turkish crowds gathered outside the burning building and chanted in anger. The fury was immediate and widely shared, cutting across communities that otherwise disagreed sharply about the politics of the Kurdish conflict.

The day after the Mavi Çarşı attack, a second bombing struck Istanbul. This one was smaller in scale: an attacker left a device under a parked car and fled. The explosion injured a police officer. Reports at the time suggested the attacker may have been caught in the blast as well. A third device, left at a fast-food restaurant, was found and defused before it could detonate; no one was hurt.

The second attack, following so quickly on the first, compounded the alarm across the city and the country. Istanbul's status as a commercial and tourist center meant the attacks drew international attention alongside domestic outrage. Tourist warnings were issued. Financial flows to Turkey were disrupted, at least in the short term, as investors and visitors reconsidered their exposure to what suddenly appeared to be a city under siege.

The investigation that followed the March bombings led to the arrest of several suspects, including Cevat Soysal, who was detained in Chișinău, Moldova, on July 13, 1999. Turkish authorities alleged that Soysal, suspected of leadership in the PKK, had been in contact with PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan and had ordered a series of violent acts following Öcalan's arrest earlier that year.

The legal proceedings that followed were long and contested. Soysal's attorneys sought access to phone recordings used as evidence and requested the criminal case files related to the Mavi Çarşı bombing; these requests were repeatedly denied by the court. The accusations regarding the specific bombing orders proved difficult to substantiate — the recorded phone calls in which Soysal allegedly gave the orders were characterized as too general to support the specific charges. Soysal was ultimately convicted not of ordering the bombings directly but of membership in the PKK under Article 168 of the former Turkish Criminal Code, and sentenced to eighteen years and nine months in prison. The conviction was reached in June 2002, after trials lasting from 1999 onward.

Soysal's case later reached the European Court of Human Rights. He was released on probation on November 30, 2008, and returned to Germany, where his family lived. The question of who precisely ordered the March 1999 attacks — and whether the Turkish judicial process that examined it met due-process standards — remained matters of legal dispute.

The 1999 bombings came at a particular moment in the Turkish conflict with the PKK: Öcalan had been captured in February 1999 after years as a fugitive, and authorities expected retaliatory violence. The Mavi Çarşı attack, whatever its precise chain of command, arrived in that context. Thirteen people went shopping on a Saturday in Istanbul and did not come home. Their deaths became part of an already long list of casualties in a conflict that had begun in 1984 and would continue for years afterward.

Istanbul would face more bombings in the years that followed — in 2003, in 2004, and beyond — each one adding to a record of violence against a city that is, above all else, a city of ordinary people going about ordinary lives.