Inside the Turkish mafia’s deadly grip on Britain’s youth: How a missing teenager in Sussex was secretly linked to a horrifying torture murder… and London’s most terrifying gangsters! B
What links a missing teenager to a horrific torture murder and the Turkish underworld?
On 15 April 2021 a news website in Sussex carried a small story about a missing teenager.
Dylan Weatherley was 17 at the time, 5ft 6inches tall, of medium build, and last seen wearing a hooded navy tracksuit with a yellow Nike logo, black Jordan One trainers and a blue puffer jacket.
The article said: ‘He has links to Tottenham, Crawley and Brighton.’
Dylan soon turned up.
Around this time he was convicted at East Hampshire Magistrates Court of possession of Class A drugs and was given a referral order, which meant no jail time.
He had clearly been involved in county lines drug dealing in those affluent parts of Sussex and Hampshire, with cocaine or heroin supplied by the Tottenham Turks.
Dylan Weatherley (left) was a member of the Tottenham Turks gang in North London after being recruited as a teenager to work in a county lines drug operation for them and played a role in the kidnap and murder of Turkish DJ Koray Alpergin (right)
Mr Alpergin’s body was found in the Oakwood Hill area of North London in October 2022
n January 2022 The Argus website again reported that Dylan, still 17, had gone missing from ‘his home in Chichester.’
Sussex Police reported they were ‘concerned for his welfare.’
Again Dylan turned up alive and well.
But nine months later, in October 2022, he played a key role in the kidnapping, torture and murder of Koray Alpergin, back in north London.
His orders came from the Tottenham Turks, one of two major organised crime groups (OCGs) whose roots are in the 50,000-strong Turkish and Kurdish community in north London.
The Tottenham Turks’ arch-rivals are the Bombacilar (Turkish for Bombers) who hailed from Hackney.
Between them the two OCGs dominate the heroin trade in Britain and have also recently begun diversifying into cocaine and other drugs.
Both supply narcotics, usually on credit, to county lines gangs who sell it in the home counties, the south coast and further afield.
The Turkish gangs also act as ‘wholesalers’, selling drugs, especially heroin, to English, Scottish and Welsh OCGs who are the ‘retailers’ in cities like Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Newcastle, Glasgow, Cardiff and Swansea.
Nine men abducted Koray Alpergin (left) and his girlfriend, Gozde Dalbudak (right), after they returned to his home in Enfield after a night out in London’s West End
Mr Alpergin was a DJ on a Turkish radios station in the UK and well known in the community in London. Pictured, he poses for a pic with rapper P Diddy
There are a few instances of the Turkish gangs getting into disputes with other crews, like the Albanians, but they save their most blood-curdling violence for each other.
The Tottenham Turks and the Hackney Bombacilar have amassed hundreds of millions of pounds over the years from drugs trafficking and other nefarious activities in the UK.
Their money is easily laundered in legitimate businesses in London, like minicab businesses, barbers’ shops, kebab shops and other small businesses, and through property investments in London and the home counties.
They operate largely under the radar but they come to the attention of the police and the general public when brutality spills onto Britain’s streets.
In January 2023 Ibrahim Gumus, 27, was shot and almost killed as he sat in a car outside his uncle’s funeral in Enfield, north London.
It was a ‘planned execution’ arranged by 33-year-old Resit Murat, a member of the Tottenham Turks.
Gumus – who was targeted after allegedly attacking one of Murat’s brothers – was taken by air ambulance to hospital where he underwent an emergency thoracotomy and open-heart surgery to save his life.
He survived, just, but suffered a hypoxic brain injury which meant he lost part of his vision and is confined to a wheelchair.
One of the Tottenham Turks former leaders was Hayri Goztas (pictured) who was the ‘godfather’ of one of Britain’s biggest drug smuggling operations
Turkish gangs have been fighting a bloody war in North London for more than 20 years
The two gunmen who targeted Gumus were Mehmet Er, who has since fled to Turkey, and Dylan Weatherley, the former missing teenager from Sussex.
In May 2024, after being convicted of conspiracy to murder Mr Gumus, Weatherley was given a life sentence, with a minimum term of 16 years.
Last week he was at the Old Bailey again when he was sentenced for his role in the events leading up to Koray Alpergin’s murder.
Weatherley’s main role was to retrieve a tracker hidden under Koray’s car after the gang had driven away with the pair in a Fiat Doblo van.
The tracker had been used to keep tabs on Koray’s movements and had made it easy to ambush him as he got home.
Retrieving it was vital, as the police would no doubt have been able to trace it back to those who purchased it, if they had found it after Koray’s death.
Weatherley’s barrister, Miranda Moore KC, told last week’s hearing her client had been ‘disposable’ to the Tottenham Turks.
‘He put himself front and centre at the scene of the kidnap. Why is he so important to the Tottenham Turks? He is not important to them. There is a history of this young man since childhood being used by them,’ she said.
Weatherley – who was convicted of manslaughter, kidnap and false imprisonment – was jailed for five years, under the complicated legal rules of ‘totality’ by Judge Sarah Whitehouse KC, who said there was evidence he had been a ‘victim of criminal exploitation.’
Boys and young men like Dylan Weatherley are cannon fodder to the Tottenham Turks and their rivals, the Hackney-based Bombacilar (Bombers) and deprived areas of north London churn them out like a production line for drug dealers.
Left: The picture of Dylan Weatherley circulated by Sussex Police when he disappeared from his family home in Chichester aged 17 and left, Tottenham Turks’ associate Yigit Hurman, 17, who admitted peverting the course of justice for the gang and was later attacked in prison
On 13 October 2022, Weatherley had been one of nine men who took part in abducting Koray Alpergin and his terrified girlfriend, Gozde Dalbudak, after they returned to his home in Enfield after a ‘pleasant night’ out in the West End of London.
Koray was taken to the Stadium Lounge, an empty bar opposite Tottenham Hotspur’s shiny new ground, which was in the process of being refurbished.
Gozde was tied up in a toilet at the Stadium Lounge and could hear her boyfriend being brutally tortured.
Prosecutor Crispin Aylett KC said: ‘Koray Alpergin was known as a popular figure in the Turkish community and it’s unclear how he came to the attention of the organised crime group who effected his kidnap during the night of 13 October 2022.’
‘They believed he had something of value, whether money or drugs, or information about money or drugs,’ he added.
Koray was tortured barbarically, in a scene which even Quentin Tarantino would have baulked at dramatising.
He had been punched and kicked repeatedly, beaten with a baseball bat, scalded with hot water.
There were a total of 94 injuries, including black eyes, a fractured eye socket and bruising of his genitals and rectum.
Two of those involved, Ali Yildirim and Cem Orman, fled the country shortly after Koray was killed and are now fugitives from justice.
They are believed to be in Turkey, and Orman was recently photographed in the city of Kayseri, in central Anatolia.
It has been rumoured Koray was involved in a drug deal for the Hackney Turks, which had infuriated their rivals from Tottenham.
But the truth may never come out.
Did Koray gave up the information his torturers wanted – if he even had it in the first place?
Did they carry on and kill him even after he coughed up?
The juries at two murder trials were never given answers to these questions and may not at a third trial, which may follow if the two fugitives are extradited from Turkey.
At the first trial, in 2023, two men – Tejean Kennedy and Ali Kavak – were convicted of kidnap, false imprisonment and manslaughter.
Steffan Gordon was jailed for eight years for kidnap and false imprisonment and Samuel Owusu-Opoku was jailed for seven years for kidnap.
The founder of the Hackney Bombers is Abdullah Baybasin, who uses a wheelchair after being shot by a rival in the 1980s
The head of the vicious mob Bombacilar was previously his brother, Huseyin Baybasin (pictured), 67, who has been called the ‘Pablo Escobar of Europe’. Anothe brother, Mehmet, 59 is currently serving a 30-year prison sentence after being convicted at Liverpool Crown Court in 2011
Yigit Hurman, who was only 17 at the time, was jailed for two years after pleading guilty to perverting the course of justice.
Hurman, incidentally, was beaten up in prison in a video which was uploaded to TikTok and has been circulating in the Turkish community in London in recent weeks.
In the video, Hurman’s attackers – who are believed to be from a rival gang in Hackney – taunted him and told him: ‘You all will pay for Koray’s death.’
At the second trial Kyrie Mitchell-Peart was jailed after pleading guilty to kidnap and false imprisonment.
Issay Stoyanov, a Turkish-speaking decorator from Bulgaria, was jailed for perverting the course of justice.
Another man believed to have been involved in Koray’s abduction was Talip Guzel, 33, who was shot dead on 30 July 2023.
Word on the street is that he was killed because the Tottenham Turks feared he would spill the beans about Koray’s killing if he was arrested.
A hooded assassin walks into a Turkish social club on White Hart Lane in Tottenham, only yards from the Stadium Lounge – as a group of older men chat to each other – picked out Guzel and immediately shot him before running off.
In August 2023 Jan Mercan, 22, was charged with the murder.
But four months later the charge was dropped.
As of today nobody has been convicted of murder in the case of Koray Alpergin or Talip Guzel.
In her sentencing remarks last week, Judge Whitehouse said: ‘It is plain that the principal movers recruited others to carry out crimes while avoiding detection themselves.’
She added: ‘It is clear that those who were the primary parties, and who inflicted appalling suffering on Koray Alpergin, have so far escaped justice.
But Yildirim and Orman were not the masterminds.
Someone higher up in the Tottenham Turks ordered Koray be tortured and, if necessary, killed.
It may have been Izzet Eren, one of the leaders of the Tottenham Turks.
Eren was so important to the organisation that in December 2015 they tried to spring him from a prison van taking him to Wood Green Crown Court for sentencing in a firearms case.
Armed police had learned of the plan and an officer shot dead 28-year-old Jermaine Baker – who was one of those who had been hired to spring Eren – who turned out to be unarmed.
Six months later Eren was given five-and-half years for conspiracy to escape and two years for conspiracy to carry imitation firearms with criminal intent, tacked on to a 14-year stretch he had been given for the firearms offences.
But Eren, a Turkish national, was then sent back to Turkey to serve the rest of his prison time.
Fortune was shining on him because in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Turkey suddenly released a large number of prisoners, including him.
Eren would later pop up in Moldova, a former Soviet republic sandwiched between Romania and Ukraine.
He had a relationship with a Moldovan woman but apparently continued to pull the strings of the Tottenham Turks and its underlings back in London.
The Met are hoping the new pictures of the motorbike will help ‘identify the dangerous individuals responsible’, thought to be from the Tottenham Turks gang
The motorcycle thought to be involved in the shooting has also been linked to areas within Peckham and Crystal Palace
Eren, it is believed, may have been behind the attempt to kill three rivals from the Hackney-based Bombacilar gang as they sat outside a Turkish restaurant in Dalston, east London, in May 2024.
A nine-year-old girl was critically injured in the botched shooting.
Javon Riley, 32, is due to go on trial in July 2025 accused of four courts of attempted murder, which he denies.
A few weeks before the Dalston shooting another senior figure linked to the Bombacilar, Ilmettin Aytekin – nicknamed ‘Tekin the Eagle’ was gunned down outside a restaurant in Barcelona, moments after meeting with Abdullah Baybasin, one of the most well known figures in the Turkish mafia.
The Baybasin family, who are linked to the Bombacilar, have been one of the biggest movers of heroin from Turkey to Britain and the rest of Europe over the last 20 years.
In 2002 a man died during a mass brawl on Green Lanes in north London between supporters of the PKK – a Kurdish group which has been fighting for an independent homeland in south-east Turkey for decades – and the Baybasin-backed Bombacilar.
The PKK were running protection rackets on Green Lanes and the Baybasins/Bombacilar were muscling in on their territory.
Abdullah Baybasin was later convicted of conspiracy to supply Class A drugs at Woolwich Crown Court, but his conviction was later quashed on appeal and he was deported to Turkey.
His brother, Huseyin Baybasin – once dubbed ‘Europe’s Pablo Escobar’ – is serving a life sentence for drug smuggling in the Netherlands.
Over the years the PKK’s influence in London faded away but a new rivalry grew, between the Bombacilar – or Hackney Turks – and their rivals, the Tottenham Turks.
This time the dispute was usually over the heroin trade, most recently over the so-called Bodrum connection.
The Eren family are central to the Tottenham Turks and the Armagan family are almost as influential among the Hackney Turks.
In February 2013 Ali Armagan, 32, was shot dead as he sat in his custom-built Audi A8 limousine outside Turnpike Lane underground station.
The following year Zafer Eren, 34, was shot dead by a hired hitman in Southgate, north London.
In July 2024 a gunman walked up to Izzet Eren, as he sat at a table outside a cafe in the Moldovan capital, Chisinau, and fired several bullets into him before escaping on an electric scooter.
Last month Hassan Toper, a lawyer who was struck off by the Solicitors Regulation Authority in 2013, was arrested in London in connection with Izzet Eren’s murder, following an extradition request by the authorities in Moldova.
He is due before Westminster Magistrates Court next month.
Meanwhile police in Britain, and across Europe, await the next violent instalment of the feud between the Turkish gangs.
