Abdullah Çatlı

Abdullah Çatlı (1 June 1956 – 3 November 1996) was a Turkish secret government agent, drug trafficker He led the Grey Wolves, the youth branch of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), during the 1970s. His death in the Susurluk car crash, while travelling in a car with state officials, revealed the depth of the state's complicity in organized crime in what became known as the Susurluk scandal. He was a hitman for the state, and was involved in the killings of suspected members of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA).

Career Çatlı was born to a Turkish family in the city of Nevşehir. He grew up in Nevşehir, a small province in Central Anatolia. Çatlı was familiar with the views of the far-right MHP and Turkish ultra-nationalists. He first came to the fore in 1977 when he shot at a police officer during a fight with left-wingers.

1978–1984 Çatlı was responsible, along with Haluk Kırcı and several other MHP members, for the 9 October 1978 Bahçelievler Massacre in which seven university students, members of the Workers Party of Turkey (TIP), were murdered, in an attack on their apartment.

He is also said to have helped Mehmet Ali Ağca murder the left-wing newspaper editor Abdi İpekçi on 1 February 1979, in Istanbul. In February 1982, he was caught with heroin in Switzerland, but managed to escape detention. In 1998 the magazine Le Monde diplomatique alleged that Abdullah Çatlı had organized the assassination attempt "in exchange for the sum of 3 million German mark" for the Grey Wolves. In 1985 in Rome, Çatlı declared to a judge "that he had been contacted by the BND, the German intelligence agency, [which had] promised him a nice sum of money if he implicated the Russian and Bulgarian services in the assassination attempt against the Pope".

1984–1996 The Turkish intelligence service (MIT) paid Çatlı in heroin, and he was eventually arrested in Paris on 24 October 1984 for drug trafficking. He was sentenced to seven years imprisonment and in 1988 he was handed over to Switzerland, where he was also wanted on charges of drug dealing. However, he escaped Bostadel prison

Turkish Prime Minister Tansu Çiller declared on 4 October 1993: "We know the list of businessmen and artists subjected to racketeering by the PKK and we shall be bringing their members to account." Beginning on 14 January 1994, almost a hundred people were kidnapped by commandos wearing uniforms and travelling in police vehicles and then killed somewhere along the road from Ankara to Istanbul. Çatlı demanded money from people who were on "Çiller's list", promising to get their names removed. One of his victims, Behçet Cantürk, was to pay ten million dollars, to which casino king Ömer Lütfü Topal added a further seventeen million. However, after receiving the money, he then went on to have them kidnapped and killed, and sometimes tortured beforehand. Çatlı's fingerprint was also allegedly found on the drum of one of the machine guns used to assassinate Ömer Lütfü Topal. In 1996, Çatlı kidnapped the TV businessman Mehmet Ali Yaprak and demanded a ransom of four million deutschmarks.

Death

Çatlı died in a car crash on 3 November 1996 in Susurluk, a town in the province of Balıkesir. Also killed in the crash were Hüseyin Kocadağ, the Director of the Police Academy in Istanbul and Gonça Us (Abdullah Çatlı's girlfriend). The Interior Minister Mehmet Ağar has signed many of the official documents he had, including the permit to carry firearms. After Çatlı died, Ağar initially claimed Çatlı was probably arrested by the Turkish authorities and been brought to justice until it was discovered that the group had stayed in the same hotel for three days, and it was the same hotel in which Ağar also stayed. Annual memorial ceremonies are held at his grave, to which also the members of the Grey Wolves attend. On 22 May 1975, they had a daughter named Gökçen, who is currently a doctoral student in politics and international relations. Later he had another daughter, Selcen.