Soner Ergin, a brother of Turkey’s Karagumruk gang leaders, has paid a visit to Devlet Bahceli, head of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), at his office. The visit is captured by a photo shared by Soner Ergin (@sonerergin25) on TikTok.

The encounter made Ergin the fourth gangster, after Alaattin Cakici, Kursat Yilmaz and Sedat Sahin, to have posed with Bahceli in his office in the wake of a prison release.

In parliament, Bahceli's MHP serves as the junior coalition partner of Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and his ruling AKP.

All of the mentioned gangsters have played roles in a wave of Grey Wolves mafia gangsterism. The Grey Wolves (Ulku Ocaklari) form the youth wing of the MHP. In the 1970s, during the Cold War, they were used to “cleanse” leftists in Turkey. Afterwards, in the 1980s, they became mafiosi.

Ergin gives an interview

On November 15, Soner Ergin talked to Baris Pehlivan of daily Cumhuriyet regarding his meeting with Bahceli.

Ergin said he told Bahceli that “Gulenist” judges and prosecutors, who remain active, were intent on keeping his two older brothers, Nuri and Vedat, behind bars for 30 years. He also apparently acknowledged that they committed the murders that were alleged in their court cases, though at the same time demanded that his brothers obtain a release like his.

“The state ordered me to kill Mustafa Duyar”

Video: Nuri Ergin: “The state ordered me to kill Mustafa Duyar. I did it. I’m saying this live [on television] now.”

Vedat Ergin: “Call Veli Abi. Call Veli Kucuk. Ask about us. I'm not saying anything else. Goodbye.”

In 2000, Nuri and Vedat hit the headlines in TV news bulletins with statements they made during an alleged riot from a window of a prison directorate building in Turkey’s Usak province in the Western Aegean.

Nuri Ergin claimed that “the state” ordered him to kill Mustafa Duyar and that he went ahead and did it.

Duyar was among the three assassins (the others were Fehriye Erdal and Ismail Akkol) who killed Ozdemir Sabanci, a board member of conglomerate Sabanci Holding (SAHOL), along with Haluk Gorgun, general manager of ToyotaSa (which was a JV between SAHOL and Japanese carmaker Toyota (Tokyo/7203)) and Nilgun Hasefe, a secretary, at the SAHOL HQ in Istanbul in 1996.

The assassins were planning to kill Sakip Sabanci, the then chairman of SAHOL. However, they killed the three people in question after they could not locate Sakip Sabanci in the building.

In 1999, Duyar was killed by members of the Karagumruk gang during a “riot” at a prison in Afyon province in the Aegean region.

The assassins were members of the Revolutionary People's Liberation Army-Front (DHKP-C), a terrorist organisation active in Turkey. It is not clear why “the state” would decide that it was necessary to silence an assassin in jail.

“Abi” means “older brother” in Turkish. Veli Kucuk, mentioned in the above video by Vedat Ergin, is a convicted gang leader who is thought to be the founder of the JITEM intelligence arm of the Turkish Gendarmerie.