Mehmet Kaygisiz

Mehmet Kaygisiz was shot in the back of the head at a Turkish cafe in Islington as he was playing backgammon.

His murder is connected to a number of other murders within the London Turkish community.

It was first thought that his murder was related to the Turkish drugs activity in London or that he might have been targeted in relation to a protection racket over his business. It was also suggested that he had been part of Dev Sol, a left wing organisation or the Kurdish nationalist PKK group and had been involved in drug trafficking and immigrant smuggling.

However, it was later suggested after certain documents were released in Turkey, that it was carried out by Turkish intelligence services and then disguised to look like a normal crime.

It was noted that during the 1990's, north London was notorious for the violence between Turkish and Kurdish gangs who fought each other for control over the city's heroin trade. Mehmet Kaygisiz was also said to have had links to the criminal underworld.

Documents released in Turkey around September 2016 during a court case indicated that his murder was ordered by the Turkish intelligence services, the National Intelligence Organisation and that Mehmet Kaygisiz was possibly targeted because he was a trade unionist or because of his links to the PKK who they classified as a terrorist organisation, with whom the Turkish authorities had been fighting for years. It was heard that his name was found on a government 'kill list' and that other documents named his murderer as a 59-year old drugs baron that had operated on behalf of senior Turkish security officials. The title National Intelligence Organisation was also abbreviated to MIT.

The man who was implicated in murdering Mehmet Kaygisiz denied it.

It was heard that documents found revealed details of conversations between the national police chief in 1994 and the drugs baron in which the national police chief had encouraged the drugs baron to murder Mehmet Kaygisiz, saying, 'Come on my Lion'. Other documents written in 1995 between the drugs baron and his MIT handler were said to have revealed that the drugs baron later reported, 'Went to the Kurdish neighbourhood in England. I called him two or three hours after our first call. My brother, I did it'. It was then heard that the drugs baron was asked if Mehmet Kaygisiz was 'injured or something', to which the drugs baron replied, 'No way. No one can save him'. It was noted that the drugs baron had at one time owned Malatyaspor Football Club, but that he had later fled Turkey after his criminality became known, which in turn drew attention to him from across Europe, resulting in him being convicted in his absence in France for drugs and weapons offences, although he had been in England at the time and it took France ten years to extradite him after which he served a few years before returning to Turkey. It was noted as such that the drug barons position might have made him more suspectable to influence by the MIT.

It was also noted that a few months after Mehmet Kaygisiz was murdered, another Turkish man was attacked in Hackney in what was described as a failed assassination and that the man's name had also been on the Turkish government 'kill list', which later heightened claims that the Turkish government were able, through the MIT to carry out assassinations in the United Kingdom with impunity. It was reported in September 2016 that the man whose name was on the same lists and whose assassination failed, was attempting to sue Turkey.

It was also noted that it was thought that the Turkish security services were also behind the assassinations of Sakine Cansiz, Fidan Dogan and Leyla Soylemez who were shot in Paris in 2013. They were all members of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, PKK. Sakine Cansiz was noted as being a co-founder of the Kurdistan Workers' Party.

However, at the time of his murder, the police reported that they thought that Mehmet Kaygisiz had been murdered in relation to an extortion racket between the Kurds and Turks.

It was also thought that his murder might have been linked to mounting pressure between Kurdish separatists and the Turkish government and the civil war in south-eastern Turkey at the time.

It was noted that Dev-Sol was not a banned organisation in the United Kingdom but that Turkey considered them a terrorist organisation and that sympathisers of Dev-Sol and the Kurdish Workers' Party, the PKK, were behind much of the Turkish orientated criminality in London, in particular, protection rackets, blackmail and extortion.

Mehmet Kaygisiz was living in Wood Green at the time and was working as a trader. It was also noted that at the time he had been complaining to friends about pressure from unknown sources who had been demanding money from him to 'protect' his business.