A municipal cleaning vehicle stopped at noon yesterday right at the point where Turkish businessman Tekin Kartal, 33, was murdered on Saturday, an individual being investigated in Turkey and the United Kingdom for his alleged links to drug trafficking. heroin. In the surroundings of Rambla de Prim, very close to the Forum, the only thing left was the shock of the countless witnesses who witnessed or heard the shots that the hitman or hitmen fired against the man. At least four in the head and a fifth in the back.
The scene was recorded by mobile phones that soon shared the image of the bloody body on social networks. The crime was committed at half past five in the afternoon; and not only in broad daylight, with many people attending the nearby April Fair. The man was not armed and had the documentation that allowed the Mossos d’Esquadra to make a first identification.
The Barcelona homicide group of the Catalan police has taken charge of the investigation and last night those responsible had still not been able to locate the victim’s family in Turkey. In fact, they were waiting for official fingerprint identification.
What Tekin Kartal did in Spain and specifically in Barcelona. The investigation has just begun and it is too early to confirm whether or not he has a criminal record. Of course not with his authentic identity, but for some time, the individual had been under the radar of the investigators responsible for heroin trafficking of the National Police. Sources familiar with the investigation consulted by La Vanguardia assured yesterday that there were indications of the presence of the individual in Spain, but located in the north, not in Catalonia. In fact, those same sources explained that the victim had traveled to Barcelona precisely to “order and oversee” a settlement of accounts with another Turkish individual who “got ahead” by murdering him first.
The truth is that Tekin Kartal, in the days he had been in Barcelona, ??had been seen with other individuals of the same nationality who, until yesterday, had been especially secretive with the investigators. The murder of Kartal opened the media news in Turkey over the weekend, where the press has written a lot in recent days about the dead man, whom they openly define as a member of the Baybasin clan. The person responsible for this mafia, Abdullah Baybasin, convicted and later acquitted in the United Kingdom, is considered one of the main heroin traffickers in Europe. In the last few hours, some members of the clan published photographs of the victim with Abdullah Baybasin.
The Turkish press has not spared speculation about the crime. From a murder ordered by the Baybasin clan itself due to some type of disagreement, to death at the hands of a rival group that was able to set a trap by summoning the man to Barcelona.
Whatever the motivation, organized crime and drugs will appear in the equation, and Barcelona will be the scene of a reckoning, which is becoming more and more frequent. Last year, Catalonia closed with 69 homicides. Organized crime has long had its sights set on Catalonia. There is no criminal organization that has not tried to establish itself in a well-connected territory, easy to go unnoticed and with criminal logistics that favors the establishment of the mafia. The big Italian bosses did it in the nineties, the Russian mafia tried it and more recently the feared Mocro Mafia, which suffered a major judicial setback in a joint operation by the Mossos and the National Police.
In recent times, marijuana has focused the official discourse of police officials on a real threat that takes advantage of the fissures in the legal system to grow uncontrollably. But the Turk murdered in the Sant Martí district is not linked to marijuana but to heroin. And those are big words.
