It was a pleasant spring Saturday in Barcelona and diners were crammed into the popular restaurants of the Diagonal Mar neighbourhood.
Inside one, on Llull Street, four men sat down for lunch. One received a phone call, excused himself and headed outside.
He made it 80 metres along the road before five gunshots pierced the din of the traffic, with four bullets striking him in the head.
Three weeks later, on 29 May, three men sat outside another busy metropolitan restaurant, this time on Hackney’s Kingsland High Street in north-east London.
At 9.20pm a motorcycle stopped outside the Evin Cafe. Five shots were fired towards the men, all of whom were injured but survived. One of the bullets hit a nine-year-old girl waiting for ice-cream with her family. She remains in hospital.
The very public shootings continued. Six weeks on, another crowded cafe in a capital city, Chisinau in Moldova. On the terrace sat a middle-aged man wearingin shorts, sliders and a baseball cap.
CCTV documents a figure in a motorcycle helmet approaching him and firing seven times into his head and back.
Brazenness is not the only connection between the apparently professional shootings. Pan-European police investigators believe they are all linked to a violent schism in the Turkish underworld. The two dead men, say police sources, were high up in some of Europe’s most feared drug gangs.
Home Office adviser Simon Harding, director of the UK’s National Centre for Gangs Research, said the Spanish, British and Moldovan shootings were “clearly linked”.
In London, officers are investigating a festering feud between two of the capital’s longstanding drug syndicates over the “botched” Hackney shooting.
Detectives are focusing on a sliver of north-east London, backdrop to a decades-old dispute between two rival Turkish and Kurdish gangs: the Hackney-based Bombacilar and the Tottenham Turks.
They are locked in a spiral of tit-for-tat brutality for control of Britain’s heroin trade.
But in an investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and the Observer, experts and police sources say that the bloodshed of the past few months marks a fresh chapter in the Turkish heroin trade.
A new era of gangland violence across Europe is unfolding, they warn, characterised by audacious killings in public places.
Europol, the EU’s law enforcement agency, confirmed it is supporting countries investigating incidents involving Turkish organised crime and said the recent shootings came amid growing violence among criminal groups that was spilling into public places.
“There is a lot of competition at the moment for market and for geographical locations,” said Claire Georges, Europol’s deputy spokesperson.
“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.”
Those officers have the unenviable task of second-guessing the next assassination’s location and target. They need answers that even the highest ranks of the Hackney Bombacilar and the Tottenham Turks might not know. Is the killing over? Or has it barely started?
The fields of Afghanistan’s Helmand province used to shimmer with poppies in spring.
Until recently, it produced more than half the opium in a country that was the world’s largest producer.
Then in April 2022 the Taliban prohibited poppy growing. Satellite analysis reveals a resulting 99% fall in Helmand’s production.
The collapse of the raw material that powered the heroin trade has had profound repercussions for the rival gangs. This sudden shortage is propelling this summer’s wave of violence, said Ian Broughton, a former detective with London’s Metropolitan police and an expert on UK drugs gangs. “If we have a shortage of heroin, they will likely be fighting for control of the heroin that remains,” he said. “It’s a perfect scenario for the violence to escalate. That is exactly what we are seeing.”
Harding added: “It’s no different to what might happen during a blockade of the Suez canal, squeezing their supply chain. Organised crime is just big business.”
A Spanish police investigator who has specialised for two decades in fighting heroin trafficking described what was happening as a “war between clans” and, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed Turkish gangs were the “masters of heroin in Europe”.
In May Europol announced that Italian police had led an investigation resulting in the arrest of 17 Turkish nationals involved in murders across Europe. No more details were provided.
Last year six members of an Istanbul-based Turkish gang were found dead in Greece, reportedly in revenge for the killing of a rival gang boss in Paris.
Mahmut Cengiz, a Turkish associate professor with the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center, and expert in the Turkish underworld, predicts the body count will 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 confirmed Turkish gangs have already expanded 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.
The bloodied body on the Barcelona pavement on 4 May was that of Ilmettin Aytekin, a Turkish citizen also known as Tekin Kartal.
The Spanish police source said they suspect Kartal was a major Turkish mafia boss. OCCRP could find no record of any convictions, but the officer described him as “a big player”.
Police are exploring a variety of theories about the motive for the murder: a settling of scores between gangs or a falling out with criminal associates.
But one detail seems to dominate. One of the diners at the Diagonal Mar restaurant was an elderly man in a wheelchair – a figure known instantly to anyone who has investigated the Turkish mafia.
Two Spanish law enforcement sources told OCCRP that Kartal was lunching with notorious gangland figure Abdullah Baybasin.
The 64-year-old Turkish citizen, who uses a wheelchair after being shot by a rival in the 1980s, is, alongside his brothers, regarded as the founder of the Hackney Bombacilar.
One of those brothers, Huseyin, known as “Europe’s Pablo Escobar”, is serving a life sentence in the Netherlands for drug smuggling.
Baybasin was convicted in a British court in 2006 for conspiracy to supply heroin, with the Hackney outfit then said to be responsible for 90% of UK heroin.
However, in 2010 he was acquitted of the drugs charge and returned to Turkey. A few months later he was again arrested and sentenced to 40 years in prison over a drugs shipment.
In 2017 he was released after the supreme court overturned his convictions.
It is unclear what relationship Kartal had with the Baybasin clan. CCTV from another Barcelona restaurant reveals he dined with Baybasin the night before his death.
In a video shared across various TikTok accounts, Abdullah Baybasin has denied involvement in Kartal’s death or the subsequent London shooting.
Huseyin Baybasin, in a website apparently updated by others, said the family found out about Kartal’s death days later but he had never heard of him.
Kartal’s murder generated a huge social media response in Turkey, with many commenters praising him for helping people.
But his death is likely to have deadly implications.
The three men targeted in the Hackney drive-by shooting have all since been released from hospital. All are believed to have ties to Baybasin’s Bombacilar, though police will not confirm.
An obvious line of police investigation is that the shootings were carried out – or ordered – by the Tottenham Turks. If so, it would be latest of more than 35 major incidents including three murders and 20 shootings between the gangs.
Cengiz confirmed tensions between the two gangs are rising, the Tottenham Turks muscling in on a market where there is less product to share.
“Recently conflicts have arisen between these groups due to the Tottenham Turks’ increasing involvement in heroin trafficking,” he said.
The target of the third shooting – outside a cafe in Moldova – was Izzet Eren, a senior leader of the Tottenham Turks.
Moldovan police described his murder as a settling of accounts between groups.
Denis Rotaru, a Turkish organised crime prosecutor, revealed multiple lines of inquiry including “conflicts between rival criminal groups”.
But another possibility would have been trying to prevent Eren from testifying in a UK court. He had been the subject of an extradition request from the UK over drug-trafficking allegations and was arrested by Scotland Yard in Moldova two years ago after an international manhunt tracked him to Ukraine.
“He came with the wave of refugees from Ukraine who were fleeing the war,” said Lilian Carp, president of the national security committee in Moldova’s parliament.
Although extradition proceedings were under way, Eren was apparently released and believed to have continued orchestrating his gang’s UK operations while on the run.
Despite a series of interlinking European police investigations, none of the hitmen has been caught.
Eren’s killer, say Moldovan politicians, appears to have fled the country on the day of the shooting, crossing into Romania by minibus.
“It was clear it was a contract killing and that the killer deliberately chose to shoot him in public at a cafe, not at his home,” said a Moldovan police source.
Kartal’s murder has led to no arrests. No suspect has been publicly identified. Numerous appeals to Turkish and Kurdish communities in London have yielded no breakthrough.
Harding, who advises the Home Office and UK’s National Crime Agency, is not surprised at an apparent lack of progress. “We’re talking about high-level people that keep business well hidden – unless you are in their inner circle,” he said.
But on Saturday, the Metropolitan police said that a man had been charged in connection with the Hackney shooting. Javon Reily, 32, was arrested on Friday following a vehicle stop in Chelsea Embankment.
Det Chief Supt James Conway said the charges were “a significant development in what has been a painstaking and meticulous investigation”. “Our thoughts remain with our young victim and her family as they continue to confront the devastating effects of gun crime.”
