From Italy he allegedly organized four attacks in Türkiye and a murder near Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin. A safe haven, our country, to remotely conduct “a war to gain supremacy over other criminal groups that have infested the Turkish state”. On the night of May 22, on the orders of the investigating judge of Milan Roberto Crepaldi, the police and the financial police arrested Baris Boyun, a 39-year-old Turk, and 18 other people in Viterbo, including 17 compatriots, from Italy, Switzerland, Germany and Turkey on various charges of criminal association aimed at an armed gang, international trafficking of weapons and drugs, aiding and abetting illegal immigration, murders, massacres, money laundering, falsification of identification documents, receiving stolen goods and self-laundering. Among those under investigation there are also two lawyers whose request for interdiction was rejected. The investigations by the central operational police service, coordinated by the prosecutor Marcello Viola and the deputy prosecutor Bruna Albertini of the district anti-terrorism section of the Lombardy capital, arose from the arrest at dawn on 5 October of three Turkish citizens, found with two guns and ammunition at the Ponte Chiasso crossing aboard a Honda Hybrid CR-V. In the car the Como policemen found documents and also a photo of Boyun immortalized with a leader’s attitude behind a desk in a sumptuous private study. The 39-year-old, born in Istanbul, had already been arrested the year before, on 3 August 2022, in Rimini on an international warrant issued by the Turkish authorities. The extradition proceedings were interrupted by the Bologna Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of Cassation due to the vagueness of the accusations and the risk that the 39-year-old, who had declared himself Kurdish and requested political asylum, could suffer inhuman and degrading treatment. However, the investigation revealed that Boyun had lied about his origins and did not even know how to speak Kurdish. The Boyun affair had created tension on the Rome-Ankara axis. During Giorgia Meloni’s visit to Istanbul, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan apparently expressed his nervousness to her over the failure to hand over her compatriot.
The arrest in Milan and the bug in the electronic bracelet
Just 24 hours before the Prime Minister’s arrival in Turkey, the investigators of the Milan Flying Squad had Boyun, in the company of his wife Ece, stopped and checked by a policeman on 19 January 2024, in the Central Station area while the couple he was returning from Malpensa airport after the 39-year-old had gone to pick up the woman who had just returned from Greece. From wiretaps, they knew Boyun was traveling with a Glock in the glove compartment. After two weeks in San Vittore, he ended up under house arrest, which he went to spend in Crotone with the electronic bracelet on his wrist, in which the investigators hid a bug with which they intercepted him. In Calabria, Boyun also suffered an attack. Two armed men, after having disconnected the light, broke into the condominium in Via Vittorio Veneto, shooting at the entrance door of the apartment. The screams of the 39-year-old’s wife from the balcony and the intervention of the police had put the killers to flight.
The organization of the attacks in Türkiye
“I’ll blow up the factory,” Boyun says the next day. While he is intercepted by his electronic bracelet, he refers to a Kurtoglu aluminum factory, in the city of Tekirdag, a town on the Sea of Marmara, attributable to his rival Saral Burhanettin, leader of another criminal organization with so-called government cover. The revenge attack on the factory was supposed to be carried out by a motorcycle fire group equipped with both long and short weapons. An hour before the scheduled time for the ambush, Boyun even gives a speech on the phone to motivate his men: «Are you ready, boys? Good luck in battle! Burn that factory to the ground.” Only the timely communication of the Italian police to the Turkish authorities who immediately sent and set up checkpoints around the factory prevented the ambush from taking place. Also in those days, Boyun, blinded by revenge, planned two more attacks, including one on a steakhouse in the Nusr-Et chain belonging to the well-known VIP chef Salt Bae. “They went on a shooting spree, the boys from Besiktas, they were already looking for an excuse, I told them ‘Do it'”, explains Boyun, defining the well-known restaurateur as “the kebab owner, partner of the Sarallars”. Then there would be the organization of the murder of a Turk on the evening of March 10 in the German capital. About ten minutes after the action, an unknown interlocutor confirmed to Boyun that “everything went well and they had finished the older brother.”
Arms trafficking in Italy
The wiretaps and flagrant arrests, according to investigating judge Crepaldi, “unequivocally demonstrate not only the wide range of weapons that characterizes the criminal group, in Italy, in Europe but also in Turkey”. Weapons that are imported into Italy and other European countries, transported and sold to other criminal organizations, but above all used by the group for acts of intimidation, murder (also on commission) and for attacks, as well as obviously for the protection of the interests of the group and of Boyun. A gang in which the thirty-nine holds “absolute leadership”: he organizes the attacks, controls the supply, use and trafficking of weapons, coordinates the actions of the cells abroad. Men and women, including his wife and a lover, swear loyalty to him, so much so that they protect him at all costs. A subordinate explains: «I sacrifice my life for brother Baris. My friends of 25 years have not been close to me, he is a man, a proper man. He hasn’t made me want for anything, for years, I’ve been here for a year, he hasn’t made me want for anything.”
