Turkish police on Sunday detained the brother of mafia boss Sedat Peker after Peker said he sent him on a failed mission to kill a Turkish Cypriot journalist 25 years ago on the orders of a former Turkish minister.
Sedat Peker, the head of one of Turkey’s most powerful mafia groups who was once a staunch supporter of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has since early May been setting the country’s political agenda through videos he posts on YouTube, each of which reaches over a million viewers on the first day of their release. The mafia boss, who lives in Dubai and is the subject of an outstanding warrant in Turkey, has been making shocking revelations about state-mafia relations and drug trafficking and murders implicating state officials.
In the seventh video he posted on Sunday, watched by more than 10 million people, Peker, in addition to making other bombshell allegations, said he tasked his brother with killing politician and journalist Kutlu Adalı in 1996 upon a request from then-Interior Minister Mehmet Ağar but that his brother was unable to carry out the murder, although Adalı was shot dead shortly afterwards in July 1996. He said Korkut Eken, a former Turkish military officer and National Intelligence Organization (MİT) agent, told him later that “another team” had carried out the murder of the journalist.
Following Sedat Peker’s claims, Atilla Peker was detained by the organized crime police at a rented house in the Aegean province of Muğla.
Following his brother’s detention, Peker asked why only his brother was taken into custody and not Eken and Ağar.
A Turkish investigation did not uncover who was responsible, and the European Court of Human Rights fined Turkey in 2005 for the failure to carry out an “adequate and effective investigation into the circumstances surrounding the killing.”
Peker said the same former minister Ağar who wanted Adalı killed was responsible for the murder of another journalist, Uğur Mumcu, and the husband of Pervin Buldan, current co-leader of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP).
Mumcu’s family on Sunday called for an investigation. Buldan said her husband had been killed by the state and that those responsible had been acquitted, adding that she would seek to have them tried again.