SLOWLY raising his hand, the motorbike assassin locked on to three men outside a London family restaurant and unleashed a deadly spray of six bullets.
They struck the targets in the thigh, leg and spine without killing them, but one stray shot hit another victim, an innocent nine-year-old girl who was enjoying ice-cream with her parents .
The bullet will forever remain lodged in her brain, leaving her with weakness on her left side and “emotional and mental scars that cannot be seen”, her family say.
The child is the latest victim of a 16-year feud and “medieval turf war” in London between two rival Turkish gangs — the Hackney Bombacilar, meaning Bombers, and the Tottenham Turks , also known as The Boys.
Former Scotland Yard detective Peter Bleksley, who was tasked with bringing them down, said: “The violence is escalating, like nothing we’ve seen before.”
And the cause of the feud? A Tottenham Turk being slapped by a Hackney Bomber in the Manor Club snooker hall in Haringey in 2009, which led to a fight.
At the time of that attack, it is claimed that one of the Bombers’ leaders, Kemal Armagan, told police not to investigate, adding: “I’m old- school, I’ll sort it out myself.”
And he sparked the brutal conflict that has since seen 20 murders — including overseas hit jobs — as well as at least 31 shootings, four arson attacks, five stabbings and several buildings sprayed with bullets.
‘Brutal and inhumane’
The gunman who devastated the little girl’s life at Dalston’s Evin restaurant in May last year fled on a stolen Ducati Monster motorbike and has never been found, despite the Metropolitan Police offering a £15,000 reward for information.
And the man thought to be the gunman’s intended target, Beytullah Gunduz, 37, escaped unharmed, as he had left minutes earlier.
In the last 40 years they have strengthened their grip and dominate so much of our heroin trade, not just in London
Former Scotland Yard detective Peter Bleksley
But the attacker’s accomplice, Jamaica -born Javon Riley, 33, who was paid £40,000 to pick up the gunman in a car and carry out reconnaissance before the attack, was this week convicted of three counts of attempted murder and grievous bodily harm with intent.
The injured child’s parents condemned the incident as “not just an accident” but “brutal and inhumane” and said it has forever transformed the life of their once “smart, funny girl”.
It has also led many to fear for their safety on the streets of North London as the violence has rocketed.
Turkish gangs are the UK’s biggest heroin suppliers, even selling to the Mafia and trading it for cocaine with the infamous Colombian cartels.
Peter told The Sun: “In the last 40 years they have strengthened their grip and dominate so much of our heroin trade, not just in London.
“It’s a massively lucrative business. Money talks, and violence is their currency. People are being murdered around the world to protect it.”
While the two gangs had been rivals for years, the January 2009 slap appears to have been the tinderbox that led to years of gruesome murders and torture, with some victims being buried in concrete.
The Bombers had established their heroin trade in the Eighties and Nineties under brothers Huseyin and Abdullah Baybasin, who were then heading the gang.
Huseyin was responsible for importing 95 per cent of the UK’s heroin , and even supplying the Mafia, and was known as The Emperor and Europe’s Pablo Escobar, after the Colombian drug lord.
By 1998 he was estimated to have a £22billion fortune when he was arrested by Netherlands police, MI6 and other intelligence services in an operation codenamed Black Tulip.
British prosecutor Robin Plummer said studying Baybasin during an eight-month undercover mission was “like watching the movie The Godfather”.
He added: “Every day someone new would come, and the first thing they would do was kiss Huseyin Baybasin’s hand.”
You’ll have one member of one OCG [organised crime gang] shot, stabbed, murdered, and then within months, sometimes even less, there will be retaliation
Detective Inspector Ben Dalloway
Baybasin was jailed for life in 2002 on several charges, and around seven years later the gang’s leadership passed down to brothers Kemal and Ali Armagan.
Since then the violence has reached fever pitch, which Met Police Detective Inspector Ben Dalloway describes as “tit-for-tat violent incidents”.
He said: “You’ll have one member of one OCG [organised crime gang ] shot, stabbed, murdered, and then within months, sometimes even less, there will be retaliation.”
Two months after the 2009 slap, Holloway shopkeeper Ahmet Paytak was killed in a spray of bullets allegedly by Kemal, in a case of mistaken identity.
In October, Boys gang member Oktay Erbasli, 23, was shot dead at traffic lights in Tottenham, leading the gang to hold a “council of war” at a local pound shop, where they plotted a revenge killing at Clapton FC where the Bombers hung out.
The Boys burst into the club and fired a sub-machine gun at people playing snooker, including innocent bystander Cem Duzgun, 21, who died.
In February 2012, Bombers co-leader Ali was fatally shot in the neck at close range in his Audi A8.
Ten months later, Boys member Kemal Eren — known as Parmaksiz, meaning “no fingers” due to his disfigured hand — was seriously injured during a gun attack in Turkey.
The following year their new boss, Zafer Eren, was shot outside his home, leading to younger brother Izzet taking over.
Baseball bat
More bloodshed followed in attacks between the groups, and even a failed attempt to free Izzet from a custody van in 2015.
It led to Uzi machine-gun-wielding Jermaine Baker, 28, being killed by police, and Izzet’s cousin Ozcan being jailed for more than eight years for his part in the prison break.
The Boys’ boss was succeeded by Kemal after Izzet was shot dead in Moldova last July, following a successful prison escape as he was transferred to a Turkish jail .
But perhaps the most chilling example of the gang’s brutality was their horrific torturing to death of DJ Mehmet Koray Alpergin, 43, in October 2022.
At least seven Tottenham Turks were involved, inflicting 94 injuries, breaking Alpergin’s ribs with a baseball bat, pouring boiling water over him, stabbing his feet, strangling him with a ligature and subjecting him to horrific internal wounds before dumping his body in Essex woodland.
The Boys had kidnapped him, with his girlfriend Gozde Dalbudak, 32, as they thought he knew the where-abouts of a stash of drugs or cash supposedly belonging to the Bombers.
Dalbudak was locked in a bathroom for two days and forced to listen to Alpergin’s agonising death, which left her “scared of the dark”, with “lasting trauma” and haunting flashbacks.
Violence has long been a tool of the Turkish gangs, with former boss Baybasin’s Haringey home having a “torture cell” fitted with a 12-inch- thick soundproof door.
Police who discovered the room in 2006 found pliers, a drill, a chainsaw and an electric torture device linked to two large metal hooks hung from the ceiling.
The same year, Scotland Yard deployed 60 undercover detectives and another 40 officers on to North London streets in a bid to curb the violence from the gangs.
Peter Walsh, author of Drug War: The Secret History, claims the Turkish gangs’ stranglehold on the UK heroin market occurred because they could slip under police radar.
He says forces believed Pakistan was the “biggest worry” for the trade and they struggled to get intelligence on the Turks or even to translate their conversations, allowing them to take root quickly.
He added: “In 1986 HM Customs found just two kilos of Turkish heroin in the whole year, so that’s why we didn’t really think there was a problem.
Utterly revolting
“By 1990, just four years later, there was a single seizure at Dover of 242kg in two lorries — they weren’t the ‘minor problem’ they believed.
“If you’d have asked people in that period, ‘What’s the biggest criminal organisation in the world?’ they would have said the Mafia. Well, the Mafia were customers of the Turks.
“It was the Turks who supplied them with heroin. They would be vying with the Colombians as the most powerful criminal organisations in the world.”
Justice has not been properly served. Nothing will change, people will die, innocent kids will get shot until we have a radical rethink on dealing with the illegal drugs industry
Peter
Peter Walsh believes the gangs are now “about as powerful as it gets” due to supplying nearly all of the UK’s heroin, and with that comes the risk to the public.
The nine-year-old girl shot in May last year needed parts of her skull removed and titanium plates inserted, and will forever suffer “physical and cognitive difficulties”.
Peter Bleksley said: “She will live with a bullet for ever in her brain, and life-changing injuries — how utterly, utterly revolting.
“While Riley has been convicted and will serve jail time, the gunman remains free to quite probably shoot someone again.
“Justice has not been properly served, the rider will be in and out in a shockingly short time. Nothing will change, people will die, innocent kids will get shot until we have a radical rethink on dealing with the illegal drugs industry.”
Both experts say the only solution is a drastic change to how we combat the drugs trade.
Peter Walsh said: “The problem in the UK is that we consume a lot of drugs, so there’s a big market for it, a big illegal market, and these people supply it and become very wealthy and as a consequence very powerful.”
Peter Bleksley suggests massive reform of our drugs policy, but warned: “We don’t have politicians courageous enough to do it.”
He added: “Until then, more blood will be spilled with more innocents caught in the crossfire, like that young girl whose life has changed for ever.”
THE HACKNEY BOMBACILAR (The Bombers)
VICTIMS OF VIOLENCE
THE TOTTENHAM TURKS (The Boys)
