He wanted to take revenge after an attack he suffered and was planning a “revolution” with 300 migrant men: the Turkish boss from Calabria ordered a factory in his home to be razed to the ground
CROTONE – «Are you ready guys? Good luck in battle! Raze that factory to the ground… come on my lions.” To take revenge for an ambush suffered last March 18th in Crotone, where he was under house arrest, the alleged Turkish mafia boss Baris Boyun he incited his men to carry out a (failed) attack to take revenge. He would have been ready to attack Turkey with terrorist attacks and was on the Interpol red list, the wanted man whose race ended in Bagnaia, a hamlet of Viterbo, being the recipient, together with 17 other people, all Turkish, some of whom reside in Italy , of a precautionary custody order in prison.
The Milan DDA accuses him of being the head of an armed organisation, with terrorist aims and the aggravating circumstance of transnationality, dedicated to aiding illegal immigration but also to drug trafficking. The cells were rooted in Germany and Turkey but also in Italy, in Milan, Alba, Asti, Vetralla and Crotone.
Only until a few months ago, the man believed to have instigated massacres and bomb attacks was in the Calabrian city, where someone fired four gunshots at the landing of his home in the central Via Vittorio Veneto. Thanks to the bugs inserted in the electronic bracelet, the Italian police alerted the Turkish police who thus foiled the attack on an aluminum factory in the Tekirdag region. An attack planned down to the smallest detail, complete with an inspection with drones: “I will blow up the factory”, he said.
Boyun wasn’t just any wanted man. He was training suicide bombers and a young army to start a “new revolution”, he said, after having had contact, so to speak, with the PKK. For the investigating judge of Milan Roberto Crepaldi. «It seems clear that Boyun is continuing from Italy (where he believes he has found protection), together with his men, a war to gain supremacy over other criminal groups that have infested, in his opinion, the Turkish state, a fight that evidently does not it involves only the criminal aspect but also the institutional one, accused of supporting and favoring other organizations”, is said in the restrictive provision. In an intercept he admitted that he had 300 of his men in prison and that he had to look after the families of a hundred of them.
His group “is not limited to a fight between clans for control of the territory and criminal dynamics (drug, arms and migrant trafficking), but takes on a truly terrorist nature.” The attacks, the murders, the knee-killings are «certainly functional to impose oneself compared to other criminal groups but also to break the existing link, again from Boyun’s perspective, between these and the State, directing the behavior of the institutions and evidently replacing to those ties”, explains the investigating judge.
The destabilization project also involved «imposing terror on the population, which was already largely terrified at the mere idea of pronouncing the name of Boyun, known as a violent and unscrupulous criminal, perpetrator of extortion, beatings, knee-jerks, murders and very serious attacks , as some interceptions demonstrate. Moreover, the use of violence is the means, in addition to the accumulation of illicit wealth, with which he intends to pursue his criminal and political objectives.” The attack on the factory near Istanbul against the rival Sarallar group, as well as for revenge, is, according to the reconstruction of the Milan Flying Squad, aimed at imposing its power on that of other criminal groups and on the State to which, according to Boyun, they are linked .
There would be no doubt about Boyun’s top position: it is he «who organizes the attacks, controls the supply, use and trafficking of weapons, coordinates the actions of the cells of his organization located abroad; to make proselytes through propaganda and the aiding of illegal immigration; it is to Boyun that the men and women who make up the organization swear loyalty, so much so that they protect him at all costs.”
The man already arrested on 3 August 2022 in Rimini. The following year, his extradition was requested from Turkey in execution of an international warrant issued on 6 April 2022 by the Istanbul Court. At the time he was under investigation in a criminal case pending in Turkey for murder, bodily harm, threats, participation in a criminal association and violation of weapons regulations. However, first the Court of Appeal of Bologna and then the Court of Cassation had denied extradition, believing that his Kurdish origins would have put him in danger if repatriated. But according to investigators, he lied about his Kurdish origins in order to obtain protection.
The investigation is inspired by three arrests in Como: on 5 October 2023, the suspects were blocked in a car at the Chiasso crossing, on the border with Switzerland, after a journey that had started the day before from Crotone. They were escorting Buyon even though he was traveling in an armored Mercedes G-class.
The “escort” is well armed because two pistols are seized, complete with cartridges, a bulletproof vest, but also documentation attributable to Buyon and his partner, Ozge Buyukkaplan, with a residence permit in Montenegro and a Turkish identity card. The three arrested are wanted in Turkey: one for murder and two on suspicion of being part of a criminal group.
“It was a complex investigation which made it possible to dismantle a group with ramifications in Europe and with a truly significant leader” said the Milanese prosecutor Bruna Albertini during a press conference. “No planned attacks have emerged in Italy or even against our institutions”, specified the head of the investigation.
Meanwhile, the Crotone Flying Squad investigates the attempted murder last March. And what a character like that was doing in a land at the crossroads of illegal immigration, home to one of the largest reception centers in Europe.
