Turkish gangs are fighting what a judge called a ‘medieval turf war’ in an area Tatler hailed as London’s new King’s Road

Only the most ruthless criminal would point a gun at a crowded restaurant from the saddle of a Ducati motorbike and pull the trigger, not once, not twice, but five times.

This, though, is what happened in the heart of supposedly gentrified Hackney last week.

Three of the bullets found the intended target, and the two associates who were with him, seated at a table outside the popular Evin bistro on bustling Kingsland Road.

But one of the stray bullets, which shattered the glass frontage, ended up in the head of a nine-year-old girl.

‘She was sitting over there with her parents,’ said the still shocked proprietor, Gazi Degirmenci, pointing to a corner of the dining area near the window where she was shot.

‘I heard a noise like the tyre of a car had punctured and, when I turned round, I saw the little girl lying on the floor. I can’t forget that moment.’

Customers tried, amid the pandemonium, to stop the bleeding with tissues and clothing before the paramedics arrived.

The youngster, whose family moved to the UK from India two years ago, is now fighting for her life in hospital.

Police might not yet have caught the gunman but they have a fair idea who he worked for.

They suspect both the would-be assassin and the three men he wounded — who, unlike the poor girl, did not suffer life-threatening injuries — have links to the Turkish underworld.

The injured trio, we have been told, are part of the Hackney ‘Bombacilar’ (Bombers) gang, also known as the ‘Bom Bom’ or Hackney Turks, who have been engaged in a ‘medieval turf war’ — the words of a judge — with the neighbouring Tottenham Turks for the past 15 years.

Think of the rivalry between Arsenal and Tottenham football fans in this north-east London postcode and then add drugs, extortion, racketeering, and sociopathic brutality into the mix.

These gangsters have largely escaped the full glare of publicity, until now, because the violence —one victim, it emerged at a recent trial, was tortured in an empty wine bar near the Tottenham stadium before his body with 94 separate injuries was dumped in Epping Forest — has been mainly confined to tit-for-tat murders and kidnappings.

The bloodshed at the Evin restaurant (Evin, ironically, means ‘love’ in Kurdish and ‘your home’ in Turkish) has turned the spotlight on them, however.

The modus operandi chosen for the ‘hit’ — a drive-by shooting in such a public place — reveals the Clockwork Orange mentality of these individuals as it was almost guaranteed to result in so-called ‘collateral damage’.

The family of the girl, who live in Birmingham, were understood to be on their way to see friends in London during the half-term break. They’d only stopped for something to eat at the last minute, such was the random cruelty of fate, because their daughter, whom neighbours describe as a ‘lovely little girl who had the most beautiful, beaming smile’, suddenly felt hungry.

At the time they were there, around 9.20pm on Wednesday of last week, a prominent Turkish crime figure, who’d just returned from his homeland after ten years away, was also at Evin, a member of the local Turkish community told me.

He was connected, he said, to a high-ranking politician back in Turkey and was the main target.

It has not been possible to verify this but, in the past, members of the Turkish government have faced allegations of involvement in international drug trafficking and corruption.

What is undeniably true is that the activities of the Hackney and Tottenham Turks lead back, in one way or another, to the foothills of Turkey.

They occupy a much higher position in the criminal food chain than the multitude of young postcode gangs responsible for the epidemic of stabbings in the capital.

The leaders of these organised crime groups (OCGs) drive expensive cars, live in big houses and operate front companies.

One boss set up a wood restoration firm. Another registered a property company. A third was a director of three firms, two of them takeaway stores in north London.

An estimated 200,000 Turkish people live in the UK, many in the North London neighbourhoods of Enfield, Haringey and Hackney. The vast majority are law-abiding, hardworking and welcoming, like Gazi Degirmenci, the 48-year-old owner of Evin bistro, in Dalston, a business he’s run since 2006.

The area is home to a plethora of traditional Turkish eateries and shops as well as cocktail bars and basement clubs.

Hackney itself was recently profiled in society magazine Tatler in a guide headlined: ‘RIP The King’s Road: How Hackney became the borough du jour.’

But the tentacles of gang culture run deep. During one incident, shortly after Evin reopened at the weekend, the bistro received an unwelcome visit from a stockily built man.

‘He had a scar across his forehead and I could tell by the way he walked that he was not an ordinary member of the public,’ said a woman from a local Kurdish group which was offering support to Mr Degirmenci. ‘He asked me: ‘Who are you and what are you doing here?’ He was threatening us.’

Kingsland Road was swarming with police when he issued the veiled threat.

Other Turkish people, who run legitimate businesses along the artery that runs from Hackney to Haringey and Tottenham, also spoke out — anonymously, for obvious reasons — in the aftermath of the gunning down of the little girl with the ‘beautiful smile’.

The picture they painted was reminiscent of the Sky series, Gangs Of London, which features a crime boss whose wife is burned alive by rivals gangsters.

Around 150 yards from Evin is a bar which is open into the early hours every weekend.

One day last year, a familiar face in the Hackney Turks was among a 15-strong group who piled into the premises and started causing trouble before demanding protection money.

‘Pay us some money and you don’t have to worry about other gangs,’ they said. When the owner asked them to leave and said he was going to turn off the music, they ‘threatened to burn the place down’.

The encounter was witnessed by the person who told me about the intended target of last week’s shooting, once a prominent community activist who still has extensive knowledge of the Kingsland scene.

Did the owner, who predictably perhaps denied that anything untoward had taken place when contacted, pay in the end? ‘I don’t know,’ the whistleblower replied.

More recently, he revealed, just three months ago, in fact, a basement social club on the strip was taken over by the gang.

‘They just moved in and said: ‘This belongs to us now,’ ‘ the contact said. The premises is still in the name of the man who has a shop above the venue, but ‘they don’t pay him anything’, he added.

Men sitting in comfortable chairs drinking coffee around a large TV were in the subterranean room, thick with smoke, when I went down there with my colleague Tim Corkett. Needless to say, they knew nothing about the sinister ‘takeover’. Of course, they didn’t.

A cocktail bar just across the street, was the scene of another disturbing story.

‘The gang wanted to sell drugs on the premises a few years back,’ the source said. ‘But the man who ran the bar said: ‘You can’t do that on my premises.’ The following day, he rang and told me what had happened. He’d been beaten up. He left not long afterwards.’ The bar is now under different ownership.

It’s hard to believe this happening in London, isn’t it?

Businesses are unhappy with the response of the police and local authorities who, they believe, are not doing enough to tackle the gangs. A petition is being started, with signatories threatening to withhold council and business tax unless something is done.

‘It’s the usual suspects who should be well known by now to the police and government authorities,’ said Rob Tao, of Harringay Traders Association.

The Hackney and Tottenham Turks are synonymous with a number of notorious crime families. The Hackney-based crime group was founded and run for many years by the Baybasin brothers, Huseyin, Abdullah and Mehmet, who recruited thugs called the Bombacilar; the name stuck.

The brothers, who used to control much of Britain’s heroin and cocaine trade and have all served long jail sentences for drug trafficking, still jointly own a seven-bedroom property in the upmarket Canon Drive area of Edgware.

Microphones and a camera were once hidden by the National Crime Agency at one of their bases in Haringey which captured the moment an errant gang member was stripped, beaten and threatened with the removal of his genitals with a machete.

The Baybasins still inspire fear but the Bombacilar have increasingly come under the sway of a younger generation led by Kemal Armagan, whose brother Ali was shot dead in his custom-built Audi 8 limousine outside Turnpike Lane Underground station in 2012.

The feud with the Tottenham Turks — headed by another pair of brothers, Izzet and Kemal Eren, whose CVs match the Baybasins — began, it is widely claimed, three years earlier after Kemal Armagan was attacked in a snooker hall by a member of the rival clan.

The subsequent war, following such a public show of disrespect, has led to dozens of murders and violent incidents from North London to Turkey. Scotland Yard intelligence reports on gang violence in Hackney and Tottenham were presented to a public inquiry, in July 2022, which was called following the fatal shooting by police of a Tottenham Turk in 2015. The police response was ultimately found to be lawful but the Metropolitan Police was criticised for a string of failings.

More revealing, in the light of recent events, were the briefing notes detailing countless incidents arising from the bloody conflict, including shootings, stabbings, petrol bombings, hammer attacks and gang venues sprayed ‘with sub-machine gun fire’.

Little has changed.

One of the most shocking incidents highlighted in the inquiry documents was the murder of innocent shopkeeper Ahmet Paytak, 50, who was gunned down by a Bombacilar motorcycle assassin in a case of mistaken identity in the store where he worked just yards from Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium in 2009.

His son Huseyin, 37, who was shot three times in the attack, is still rebuilding his life after watching his father die in front of him and being seriously injured himself.

‘I still suffer from PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] because of what happened,’ he said. ‘I avoid taking about it. It brings back a lot of flashbacks.’

Back at the Evin bistro, details emerge about the behaviour of the gang members sitting outside. They had been aggressive and rude, staff said.

Initially, there were four of them but one, named by locals as Beytullah Gunduz, left 15 minutes before the restaurant was sprayed with bullets.

Gunduz, in his late 30s, who was cleared of hiring a hitman himself ten years ago, survived an attempt on his life in 2020 when a gunman on a motorcycle shot him in the neck.

He is listed as director of a firm which rents and leases cars and ‘light motor vehicles’.

There was no response from the intercom at his flat this week, but a man who came to a second-floor window hurled abuse at us. ‘F*** off, you retards,’ he shouted angrily . . . f****** journalists . . .’

I was told about more violence in North London this week.

The victim, a Turkish man, was shot in the back of his shoulder at his allotment in Enfield.

‘I am really scared things are going to get worse unless something is done,’ said bistro owner Mr Degirmenci.

For the family of the little girl who is still in a critical condition, it already has.

Additional reporting: Tim Corkett