Members of an international crime gang were allowed to move to Britain while flooding the country with heroin because their leader had secretly worked as an informer for Customs & Excise, according to evidence brought before an immigration appeals tribunal.
The Baybasin Cartel, a notorious Kurdish gang, is estimated by police to have controlled up to 90% of the heroin which entered the country after its leading members settled in the home counties in the mid-1990s.
Gang members also became involved in protection rackets and extortion in the UK, and were linked to a series of turf disputes which resulted in up to 25 murders. On one occasion, Baybasin mobsters were involved in a shoot-out across a busy shopping street in north London on a Saturday afternoon.
The gang was already notorious among law enforcement agencies across Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia when its members were allowed to move from Turkey to London, allegedly after their leader, Huseyin Baybasin, agreed to tell Customs investigators what he knew about the involvement of senior Turkish politicians and officials in the international heroin trade.
According to evidence presented behind closed doors in a series of immigration hearings, Baybasin was encouraged by Customs to come to the UK and arrived via Gibraltar in either late 1994 or early 1995. He first met Customs officers in a hotel near Tower Bridge, London.
That evidence, which has been seen by the Guardian, suggests that many of Baybasin’s associates were subsequently able to settle in the UK because Customs & Excise accepted that they would be in danger in Turkey once he had been recruited as an informer. They are thought to have entered the country illegally, using forged Dutch passports, and no attempt was made to regularise their immigration status for several years. Nevertheless, one witness statement prepared for the tribunal, from a man who helped to set up the meeting with Customs, talks of the UK becoming a « sanctuary » for the gang’s leaders.
As well as continuing to run their vast drug trafficking operation from London, gang members were feared for their willingness to employ extreme violence, and terrorised members of the Turkish and Kurdish communities in the UK. They and their relatives also persuaded a number of politicians to support their attempts to obtain British travel documents. Among those who agreed to help was Tony McNulty, the current immigration minister, who wrote a number of letters on behalf of Baybasin’s wife after her husband was arrested in the Netherlands.
Baybasin, 49, is now serving a life sentence in a Dutch jail for drug smuggling, kidnapping and ordering a number of contract killings. His wheelchair-bound brother, Abdullah, 45, who took the helm after his conviction, was also arrested and successfully prosecuted only after a lengthy operation by the National Crime Squad, during which detectives hid a tiny camera in the London office from which he masterminded the gang’s affairs.
He is due to be sentenced on Friday after being convicted of conspiracy to supply heroin and admitting conspiracy to blackmail and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.
It was at Abdullah Baybasin’s asylum hearings that the alleged deal with Customs & Excise was disclosed. Despite having already served a prison sentence for firearms offences and despite having to give evidence from Belmarsh high security prison, where he was on remand, Abdullah was given indefinite leave to remain in the UK last year.
Several other relatives also remain in this country. They include Huseyin Baybasin’s two other brothers, Sirin, 43, and Mesut, 33. Sirin was once extradited from Spain to Italy to stand trial on drug smuggling charges but acquitted. Mesut told the Guardian that he fully expects the National Crime Squad « to come for us » in the near future, but insisted that he and his brother were innocent and were being victimised.It is unclear whether Customs was operating with ministerial approval. Michael Howard, who was home secretary at the time, and Ann Widdecombe, the then immigration minister, said they could not recall the name Baybasin. Revenue & Customs, which now includes Customs & Excise after a merger with Inland Revenue, said it could not comment on any matter concerning alleged informers.
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