Spate of Killings in Europe Reveal Escalating Conflict in Turkish Criminal Underworld

The bloody three-month spree began on the streets of Barcelona in May. A man having lunch in a popular seaside neighborhood walked away from his fellow diners after receiving a phone call.  Shortly afterwards he was shot dead by an assassin who ran from the scene. 

Three weeks later, three men were injured in a drive-by shooting at a restaurant in London that horrified the U.K. as a nine-year-old girl was caught up in the attack while eating with her family. She was hit by a stray bullet, leaving her in critical condition. 

The ferocious and very public violence continued in Moldova when a 41-year-old man was killed at an outdoor table at a busy cafe in the capital Chișinău in mid-July, having been shot seven times.

Rival Turkish criminal gangs locked in a spiral of tit-for-tat brutality have been linked to the attacks, with two of the victims identified by police sources as major mafia figures. 

Experts and law enforcement sources told OCCRP the recent bloodshed marked a serious escalation in volatility within the Turkish criminal underworld and heralded a new era of violence across Europe. 

Six members of an Istanbul-based Turkish criminal gang were found dead in Greece last year in what was reported to have been revenge for the killing of a rival gang boss in Paris. In May this year, Europol announced that Italian police had led an investigation that resulted in the arrest of 17 Turkish nationals involved in murders in Europe, without specifying further. 

Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement agency, told OCCRP it was supporting countries investigating incidents involving Turkish organized crime amid a general rise in violence among criminal groups of various nationalities across Europe —  which is playing out dangerously in public places. 

“There is a lot of competition at the moment for market and for geographical locations,” said Claire Georges, a deputy spokesperson for Europol.

“Before, the violence was more limited to transit points or transport hubs. Now we’re seeing it in the streets and this is why law enforcement is taking it very seriously,” she added.

The uptick in violence in the Turkish criminal underworld is likely driven in part by a massive shortage in the supply of heroin —the main illegal commodity traded by Turkish gangs — due to the Taliban’s ban on opium cultivation in Afghanistan in 2022, experts and law enforcement sources said.

“If we have a shortage of heroin, they will likely be fighting for control of the heroin that remains,” said Ian Broughton, a former detective with London’s Metropolitan Police and an expert on illicit drugs and street gangs in the U.K. “It’s a perfect scenario for the violence to escalate, and that is exactly what we are seeing.”

Simon Harding, director of the National Center for Gang Research at the University of West London, told OCCRP media partner The Guardian he believed the shootings in Barcelona, London, and Moldova appeared to be linked and that they showed that even the most senior and feared crime bosses were vulnerable in times of upheaval.

“It shows trust can be bought, allegiances can be bought,” said Harding, who advises the U.K.’s Home Office, London’s Metropolitan Police, and National Crime Agency. 

A Spanish police investigator who has specialized for two decades in fighting heroin trafficking described what was happening as a “war between clans.”

The source, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the media, said Turkish criminal gangs were the “masters of heroin in Europe,” bringing in shipments through the Belgian port of Antwerp or on trucks through the Balkans. They have a structured presence in Barcelona, with restaurants as the nerve center, the source said. 

Like Broughton, the Spanish police source said a shortage of heroin from Afghanistan had led to a reduction in supply and a huge rise in prices. 

Mahmut Cengiz, an associate professor with the U.S.-based Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center at George Mason University, who is an expert in the Turkish criminal underworld, predicted that the body count in the escalating drug war would rise.

“Given their operational capacity, dominance in crime sectors, and extensive global networks, I anticipate more assassinations as these groups compete for larger shares of the lucrative drug trafficking market,” he said. 

Cengiz also described how Turkish gangs are expanding their operations — diversifying from heroin to cocaine trafficking. 

“Recently, significant amounts of cocaine have been imported into Turkey from Latin America, facilitated by collaborations between Turkish criminal groups in Europe and within Turkey itself,” he said.

Cengiz added that Turkish gangs were also trafficking methamphetamine sourced from Iran, which enters Turkey and is then distributed around Europe. 

“Human smuggling and trafficking are also prevalent activities among these criminal networks,” he said. 

Barcelona Victim was Dining with London Gang Boss

The victim of the Barcelona lunchtime shooting on May 4, 2024, was a Turkish citizen named Ilmettin Aytekin who went by the nickname “Tekin the Eagle,” or “Tekin Kartal” in Turkish.

He was suspected to be a major Turkish mafia boss, according to the Spanish police source, who described him as “a big player.” (OCCRP could find no record that he had ever been convicted of a crime.) 

His murder is being investigated by the Mossos d'Esquadra, the Catalan police. No suspect has been publicly identified. Police sources say they have multiple theories about the motive for the killing, including a settling of scores between gangs, revenge for a love affair, or a falling out with criminal associates. 

The sources described how Kartal was having lunch in Barcelona’s popular Diagonal Mar neighborhood with three other men, including one in a wheelchair, when he received a call on his cell phone and left the restaurant. It is not clear if he left the table to answer the call or to meet the person who was calling him.

He only walked around 80 meters before being shot five times near a bus stop. Four of the bullets hit him in the head. The assassin ran off, leaving Kartal in a pool of blood. 

Sources told OCCRP that police from the United Kingdom, Germany, Greece, and Italy are following the case closely, particularly since it appears that the man in the wheelchair who was dining with Kartal was notorious gangland figure Abdullah Baybaşin.

Two Spanish law enforcement sources told OCCRP that Kartal was having lunch with the 64-year-old Turkish citizen, who is part of a clan that has long been linked with Europe’s drug trade. 

His brother Hüseyin Baybaşin, once known as ”Europe’s Pablo Escobar,” is now serving a life sentence in the Netherlands after being convicted of drug smuggling.

Abdullah Baybaşin, who uses a wheelchair after being shot in the 1980s, was convicted in the U.K. in 2006 for conspiracy to supply heroin and admitted to blackmail. Media reports at the time said the gang that he led, known as the Hackney Bombers or Hackney Turks after the area of northeast London in which they operate, were responsible for the entry of 90 percent of the heroin consumed in the United Kingdom.

However, in 2010, he was acquitted of the drug charge during a retrial. He returned to Turkey, where a few months later he was arrested again and sentenced to 40 years in prison over a cocaine shipment from Bolivia. In 2017 he was released after the Supreme Court overturned his convictions and was placed under judicial control and a travel ban, Turkish media reported.

Turkish police did not respond to questions from OCCRP about the current legal status of Baybaşin. OCCRP found videos and photos posted on a Baybaşin fan page on TikTok as recently as June 2024 that show him in the north of Spain. 

It is not clear exactly what relationship Kartal had with the Baybaşin clan. Camera footage from inside another Barcelona restaurant showed Kartal had also dined with Baybaşin the night before he was shot. Images posted to fan pages on social media in 2018 and 2019 show the two posing for photos together.

In a video shared across various TikTok accounts that follow Turkey’s underworld figures, Abdullah Baybaşin denied that he was involved in Kartal’s death, or the subsequent shootings in London. 

“If it had anything to do with me, this state is not stupid, they would take me, take my statement and put me in jail,” he said in the video. He did not specify which country he was referring to. 

Abdullah’s brother Hüseyin, said in a statement from prison that he had never heard of Kartal, although he said it was “natural” that Kartal would have known some of his family as they were from the same Diyarbakir area of southeast Turkey. 

Tekin Kartal’s  murder generated a massive social media response in Turkey, where he had a loyal following among Turkish and Kurdish young people. Videos honoring him spread on social networks, especially TikTok, where commenters praised him for “never forgetting the people.” 

Hackney Bombers vs Tottenham Turks 

On May 29, just over three weeks after Kartal’s death, three men were shot and injured by an attacker on a motorbike who sprayed bullets at a restaurant on Hackney’s Kingsland High Street, famous for its buzzing, unfussy cafes.  

A nine-year-old girl was also hit and remains in critical but stable condition. Her parents have told British media they do not know whether she will fully recover. The restaurant, called “Evin,” says on its website homepage that the name means "love" in Kurdish and "your home" in Turkish. 

British newspapers reported that police suspected another notorious north London gang called the Tottenham Turks was behind the attack and that they may have been targeting a member of the Hackney Turks. It is not clear whether the three men who were injured had gang affiliations. But one man who has been linked with the Turkish underworld and who had left the group of men who were injured around 15 minutes earlier told The Times he believed he had been the intended target. 

The Metropolitan Police appealed to the Turkish and Kurdish communities in the north and east of the city for information about the crime, saying that the three men had connections to those communities. They declined to give further detail about what lay behind the attack when asked by OCCRP. 

Cengiz, the professor, explained that the Tottenham Turks’ members are mostly ethnically Turkish while the Hackney Turks, linked to the Baybaşin clan, are predominantly Kurds. Tension between the two major London-based gangs is rising, he said. 

“Recently, conflicts have arisen between these groups due to the Tottenham Turks' increasing involvement in heroin trafficking,” he said. “This rivalry has led to both groups targeting each other in violent clashes.”

The U.K.’s Harding said the lack of arrests in the cases so far reflected the nature of organized crime groups. “They operate in a very cloaked, veiled way. We are not talking street boys here, we’re talking about high-level people that keep business well hidden unless you are in their inner circle,” he said. “There will be intelligence, but intelligence is not evidence. If you make the arrest and get it wrong, you’ve done more harm than doing nothing.”

On July 10, just six weeks after the tragic London restaurant drive-by, it was the Tottenham Turks’ turn to be targeted, this time on the streets of Moldova. 

Izzet Eren, 41, who was reportedly one of the leaders of the Tottenham Turks and had been described by British police as a senior member of a Turkish crime family, was hit by seven bullets in a cafe in a busy neighborhood of Chișinău. Moldovan police described his murder as a settling of accounts between groups or a deliberate killing to prevent him from making statements in a case in the U.K., where Moldovan prosecutors said he was wanted in connection with crimes relating to illegal drug trafficking. 

Denis Rotaru, a prosecutor at the Moldovan Prosecutor's Office for Combating Organized Crime and Special Cases, told OCCRP that there are multiple lines of inquiry “including the possibility that the murder occurred as a result of conflicts between rival criminal groups."

Eren was sentenced in the U.K. to 21 years in prison in 2015 for firearm offenses and in August 2019 was transferred to a prison in Turkey to serve his sentence, but escaped a month later.

Lilian Carp, president of the National Security, Defense, and Public Order Committee in Moldova’s parliament, said Eren had entered Moldova from Ukraine two years ago via the breakaway pro-Russian Transnistrian region, which is home to Russian military bases and troops. "He came with the wave of refugees from Ukraine who were fleeing the war," Carp said.

Eren was sitting on the cafe’s busy terrace on a sunny morning when the killer approached his table and shot him in the head and back. Surveillance footage shows Eren slumped motionless on his chair as people flee in panic. 

Despite it being a warm day, the killer wore a long-sleeved shirt and white trousers that covered his hands and legs well enough to hide tattoos or other identifying marks, as well as a helmet and black face mask. He was later spotted riding an e-bike, still fully masked. 

“It was clear it was a contract killing and that the killer deliberately chose to shoot him in public at a café, not at his home,” a Moldovan police source told OCCRP. 

National politicians and local media said the killer left Moldova on the same day he shot Eren. He crossed into Romania by minibus and is believed to have flown from there to Italy.

Moldovan police have arrested two suspects who they describe as accomplices in the crime. Prosecutors have opened a criminal case for premeditated murder, although the suspected killer remains at large.

At the time he was shot, Eren had an extradition request from the U.K. pending but judges had not yet decided on whether he should be sent there after several court sessions were postponed.  

Following his murder, Moldovan parliamentarians voted to amend legislation to expedite extradition.

Mark Townsend (The Guardian) contributed reporting.