bne IntelliNews – Motorcycle assassinations emerge as latest phenomenon in Turkey
More than 30 armed attacks were carried out by motorcyclists in Istanbul last year, according to data compiled by Gazette Duvar.
Similar attacks took place in Izmir, Karaman, Adana, Bursa, Diyarbakir and Ankara.
Most of the incidents received no significant media coverage, nor were they high on the country’s agenda. In some cases there were fatalities, in others the shooters chose to simply wound their target or aim at a home or workplace.
In September, Jovan Vukotic, the leader of the Skaljari criminal clan in Montenegro, was shot dead by a motorcyclist in Istanbul. His name was notorious in the city and his death was the number one topic in the local media for a few days.
Story screenshot video source: The moment of Jovan Vukotic’s assassination. The hit was purely professional. One person rode the motorcycle while the killer sat in the back seat. The killer just fired at his target in the car while both the car and motorcycle were moving.
In January, Sinan Ates, a former leader of the Gray Wolves (Ulku Ocaklari), was shot dead by motorcyclists in Ankara. He also topped local headlines for about a week.
The Gray Wolves group is the youth wing of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), the junior coalition partner of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).
It is said that Ates was also close to the palace administration and as a result some details of his case were “leaked” to the media.
The organizer of the murder is said to have been Dogukan Cep, a gangster active in Istanbul’s Gulsuyu district. He previously served under paramilitary forces deployed during the Syrian War. After returning to Turkey, he turned to violent organized crime.
The recent wave of gangsterism that has swept Turkey is indeed linked to the Syrian war. As of 2011, many young men in Turkey were recruited to fight against the Assad regime. When the war entered its stabilization phase around 2015, the now experienced “paramilitants” returned to their homeland. As usual, those who risked their lives for their state gained immunity in their “para-official” drug deals and other criminal activities.
This is not the first wave of para-official gangsterism Turkey has experienced. The previous wave, carried by the state war against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) from the late 1980s, was a difficult affair for Turkey in the 1990s. Runaway mobster Sedat “The Botox” Peker, who went viral on social media last year when he began singing like a canary in video posts exposing the crimes of government officials, was a product of that wave.
Before the war against the PKK came the Cold War days, when the Gray Wolves were used to “cleanse” leftists in the 1970s. In the 1980s they became the “Gray Wolves Mafia”.
The whole phenomenon is reminiscent of Sultan Abdulhamid’s irregular Hamidiye cavalry regiments from more than a century ago.
Over the past year, as The Botox publicly aired the Turkish state’s dirty laundry, it has become increasingly clear that Turkey has turned into a Wild West for gangsters shooting each other with gay revelry across the country.
In addition to the local gangs, foreign gangsters have increasingly settled in Turkey due to the Erdogan government’s “wealth amnesty laws” that have been in force since 2008.
Basically, no one asks, “Where did you get your fortune from?” when someone brings a pile of money or a chest of gold to Turkey. It’s no surprise the gangsters arrive with their money laundered. The shooting followed.
Cases of Iranian and Azerbaijani mafiosi gunning down their enemies in Istanbul shopping malls, or a Montenegrin gang hiring a local gang to assassinate a Montenegrin rival are standard nowadays.