The Turks of London

I have been following the machinations of the Turkish and Kurdish underworld in London for almost a quarter of a century and this seems like the perfect time to tell the story. The reason I am doing this episode now is because of the conviction (on Friday 5 June) of Beytullah Gunduz, one of the leaders of the Hackney Turks - one of two violent feuding gangs in London. The other being the Tottenham Turks. So come with me as I explain the bitter history behind this feud and tell you about the recent extortion trial which ended with a guilty verdict for Gunduz.

Transcript

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Hello and welcome back to the Total Crime Podcast. I'm Chris Summers and this is episode seventeen. Today I'm going to tell you all about two very violent Turkish gangs based in London whose mutual hatred has led to a string of murders over the years and also an incident which hit the headlines in 2024 when a nine year old girl was hit by a stray bullet. Now I have covered the Turkish and Kurdish underworld in London for almost a quarter of a century, so I thought it was about time I made a total crime podcast episode about them. So one of these gangs is called the Tottenham Turks, and the other is the Tacni Turks, who are often referred to as the Bombachila, which is a Turkish word meaning the bombers. Now the reason I'm doing this episode now is that on Friday, that's the fifth of June, one of the leading members of the Hackney Turks was convicted of conspiracy to murder. His name is Betulla Gunduz, and I was in court six at the Old Bailey when the jury found him guilty. Now I will go into a lot more detail about him and the trial later, but first I need to need to give you the backstory or the origin story, as they'd say in the world of superheroes. So I've been following what has been going on in this part of North London for a long time, as I said. It all started for me in 2002, when there was a huge brawl in Green Lanes. Now Green Lanes, if you don't know it, is a road which runs north to south from Newington Green to Turnpike Lane tube station, that's in sort of northeast London. It is sometimes called the Turkish Quarter because of the large number of Turkish and Kurdish cafes, restaurants and other businesses there. Now on Saturday the ninth of november two thousand two, a mass brawl took place outside a cafe called Dosla Lokali in Green Lanes. Dosla Lokali translated into English is ironically friends local or local friends, but this brawl was anything but friendly, and it ended with forty three year old Alisan Dogan being stabbed to death. Now this was by no means the first death in the Turkish underworld in London. There were at least four unsolved murders between nineteen ninety four and two thousand two, starting with Memet Kagus, a thirty three year old who was shot dead while playing Batgammon in an Islington cafe in march nineteen ninety four. But in two thousand two I was working for the BBC and I began to dig into the reasons behind the Green Lane's brawl, and I discovered that it stemmed from a feud between two rival groups. One was the PKK or Kurdistan Workers Party, which had been fighting for a separate Kurdish homeland in southeast Turkey for decades. The PKK's supporters in London demanded what they would call a revolutionary tax on predominantly Kurdish businesses in the Green Lanes area, but their rivals the Hackney based Bombachilla or Bombers wanted to muscle in on this extortion racket. At the time I was told the bombers were closely associated or even led by a London based drug baron called Abdullah Bebashin. For legal reasons I couldn't name him at the time in my article, or even two years later when twenty year old Vesal Yavuz walked free after an old Bailey jury was unable to reach a verdict at his trial for the murder of Alisandogen and the Crown Prosecution Service decided against a retrial. But in the spring of 2006, some reporting restrictions were finally lifted and I could name Babashin after he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to blackmail and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. He had previously been convicted of conspiracy to plant supply heroin. I could also report at that time that his brother Hussein, once described as Europe's Pablo Escobar, was already serving a long sentence in a Dutch prison for drug smuggling. Now I will probably tell the full Bebashin story in another podcast, but between 2002 and 2009, there was a gradual realignment of organised crime groups in this patch of North London. The PKK, which had become a proscribed or banned terrorist organization in Britain in 2001, had faded away as a power, but the Bombachilla had remained and increasingly became known as the Hackney Turks. They were the dominant force at the southern end of Green Lanes, and in the Hackney, Dawston and Stonek Newington areas. Now at this point you might need to concentrate or even pause and play back the podcast a few times, because we're going to get deep into detail and there are a lot of names involved. So the rising power which began to challenge the bombers was the Tottenham Turks, who were led by the Erin family, that's E R E N, and their power base was at the northern end of Green Lanes and Tottenham itself. Now while the Eren brothers and cousins ruled the Tottenham Turks, the most powerful name in the Hackney Turks was the Armowan family, and that's that's spelled A R M A G A N, but I believe it's pronounced Armagan and particularly Ali and his brother Kamal. Amazingly I later found out that the Erns and the Armans actually both had their origins in the same area of central Anatolia, that piece of Western Asia which juts out into the Black Sea and forms the majority of Turkey. The Erns are from the town of Elbistan in Anatolia, and the Armowans are from the nearby village of Kirkishrak. Now in february twenty twelve, Ali Armowan, who was thirty-two, was shot dead as he sat in his custom built Audi A eight limousine outside Turnpike Lane Underground Station. Nobody was ever convicted of the murder, but three men were jailed for between eight and eleven years after being found guilty of conspiracy to cause grievous bodily harm. A jury at their old Bailey trial heard they spotted Ali Yamawan at Turnpike Lane station and tipped off one of the Tottenham Turks leaders, Kemal Erin, who had deployed gunmen to shoot him. Kamal Erin had by this point relocated from London to Turkey, and December in December twenty twelve he was shot and wounded at his home in his hometown of Elbistan. Kamal Erin was nicknamed Parmakz, which I understand means no fingers in Turkish, because he had several missing fingers from a previous attack. And after the December twenty twelve assassination attempt, he was also left paralyzed. But this has not stopped Kamal Erin from playing a key role in the war with the Hackney Turks. In April twenty thirteen, the Hackney Turks struck again, killing thirty four year old Zafa Erin in Southgate, North London. Now one of the people the police picked up and charged with Zafer's murder was our old friend Beethoven Gundus, who I mentioned at the start of the episode. Now in july twenty fourteen, the hitman who'd been hired to kill Zafer, twenty three year old Jamie Marsh Smith, was found guilty of his murder. Marsh Smith was nicknamed Freddie after Freddy Kruger because of his ruthlessness, and he was also convicted of shooting his accomplice Samuel Zaray. Zeray, who Marsh Smith feared was going to squeal to the police, survived, and was also jailed for his role in the murder. But in november twenty fourteen, Gundus, who was believed to have hired Marsh Smith and Zaray to kill Zafer, was acquitted of conspiracy to murder and was back on the street. I've said instead of seeing it as a lucky break and deciding to go straight, Gundus went straight back to his pals in the Hackney Turks and straight back to the criminal life. Now let's fast forward ten years and we come back to that night in may twenty twenty four when Gundus and several other Hackney Turks were sitting outside the Evin, a Turkish restaurant in Dawston on a very pleasant summer's evening. Now I told you now I told the full story of that evening in August 2025 in a total crime substack which you can find with a quick Google. But I'll give you a very brief summary of it. So Gunders arrived at seven fifty nine PM and after chatting to his buddies for an hour, he left at nine hundred oh two PM. Seventeen minutes later, a gunman on a motorcycle turned up and fired six shots at the Hackney Turks. He injured three of them Mustafa Kiziltan, Kenans Edogdu, and Nasa Ali. But the incident's most serious casualty was that nine year old girl who was eating an ice cream inside the restaurant at the time. Her family had nothing to do with the Kang feud, and I understand they were just visiting London from their home in the Midlands. It was just bad luck that a stray bullet hit that little girl in the head, and it was only due to the immense skill of doctors and surgeons that she survived. She had to have a titanium plate fitted in her skull, and the bullet still remains lodged in her brain, but she has apparently made quite a remarkable recovery. The gunman who fired the shot after arriving on a motorbike has never been identified, but another man who helped him and drove him away from the scene, Javon Riley, was convicted for his role and in september twenty twenty five was locked up for a minimum of thirty four years. During Riley's trial, another member of the Hackney Turks, who'd been sat at the same table as the others, Erdal Osman, was shot dead in Stoke Newington. But let me rewind a bit to explain why Osman was killed. You see, in august twenty twenty four, Iza Erin, another member of the Tottenham Turks, had been shot dead as he sat at a cafe table in Chizinao, the capital of Moldova, that tiny East European country which you probably only hear of once a year because of Eurovision. Well, what was Izet Erin doing in Moldova? Well this is a very long story, but I will make it brief. Back in december twenty fifteen, a group were hired to spring Isit Erin from a prison van as it took him from Wormwood Scrubs to Wood Green Crown Court. But the Metropolitan Police caught wind of the plot and armed police were sent to intercept the gang. But the operation went awry and one of the gang, Germaine Baker, was shot dead in a car. He had been unarmed. Eventually Izeran, who had a Turkish passport, was sentenced and the British Home Office agreed a deal with Turkey for him to be sent back to serve the rest of his sentence there. What happened next is a bit of a mystery, but he was either let out by a corrupt judge, or he was freed by the Turkish authorities because the jails were overcrowded and this was the time of the COVID pandemic. Anyway, Izit soon moved to Moldova, and that's where he was hiding out. He may have been involved in the planning of the Evin restaurant shooting and been killed in retaliation, or he may have been killed because of his role in the murder way back in twenty twelve of Ali Armowan. We don't know at this point. But we do know that Ali Armowan's brother, Kemal, was arrested in Moldova and is due to go on trial with two other men for Isit's murder. So let's get back to where I started with Beetulla Gunders. I covered his recent trial and I wrote a detailed substack on it, which I published on Saturday the sixth of june twenty twenty six, so I recommend you read that. But let me give you a brief taste of what it what is uh in there. Just before eleven PM on the twentieth of june twenty twenty five, a man called Honor Guzell, whose father owns the Um two thousand restaurant in Dawston, was taking a break during his shift and was on the phone to his wife on the street outside the front of the restaurant. A car slowed down next to him, and the driver leaned across and fired a single shot through the passenger window, which hit Mr Gazell in the abdomen. The police have released the footage and you'll find it on my sub stack and also on my total crime YouTube page. It's quite shocking. Prosecutor Jane Bickerstaff KC told the jury at the recent trial that Mr Gazelle survived his injuries, but he suffers serious lasting effects, including being forced to wear a stoma bag because of the damage to his bowels. The trial was told that the car was a stolen white Kia Nero, and the driver, and therefore the gunman, was Dogen Over, who was employed by Hackney Counsel as a bindlery driver. Over has fled to Turkey and was not on trial recently. But the prosecution said he had carried out the shooting on the orders of Gundus, who was furious that the Gusel family had refused to pay up a hundred thousand pounds which he and the Hackney Turks had demanded of them. Now, the word for extortion in Turkish is harach, and it's a word that dates back to the Ottoman Empire. In those days it was a land tax levied on the Sultan's non Muslim subjects, and was used as a bit of an incentive to persuade people to to persuade Christians and Jews to convert to Islam in in countries like Bulgaria, Greece and Bosnia, which were ruled by the Ottoman Empire. But in 2026, harach is simply a word for money paid by frightened people to avoid their properties being set on fire or smashed up by criminal criminals or even themselves being shot. Now the trial heard that the Tottenham Turks had originally tried to extort money from the Ulmut 2000 restaurant, but the family refused. But then to make matters worse for them, the Hackney Turks believed they were play paying the Tottenham Turks. Gundus and one of his cronies visited the restaurant and made it clear that the Tottenham Turks were their enemies. But the family denied that they were making any payments. Despite that, Gundus and his pal insisted they pay them a hundred thousand pounds. When they didn't, the shooting was perhaps an inevitable consequence. Now I understand from my sources inside the Turkish and Kurdish community in London that a lot of people have been getting really fed up of the hackney Turks throwing their weight around like this, and there is quite a palpable sense of relief that Gundus has been found guilty. He will be sentenced next month and is looking at I would say at least fifteen years in prison. Dogen Over, if he ever returns or is extradited to the UK, would also go on trial for conspiracy to murder. Nobody has been charged with the murder of Erdal Osman, which at this point remains unsolved. I've been following the war between the Tottenham Turks and the Hatting Turks for almost twenty years now, and I fear there is no sign of an end to it. Thanks for listening, and I hope you'll come back to hear the next episode of the Total Climb.