Hasan Ferhat Baybasin has been arrested as part of an international anti-mafia investigation into a vast network of tobacco smugglers moving huge illegal shipments around the world
The owner of a Nottingham grocery store has been arrested on suspicion of masterminding a £40million international cigarette smuggling network.
Hasan Ferhat Baybasin, 34, was held as part of a huge operation spanning five countries led by the Anti-Mafia Investigative Directorate (DIA) in Italy. Officers seized over 40 tonnes of illegal cigarettes worth around £40m along with assets worth over £2million.
Baybasin, from Edgware, north London, appeared at Westminster Magistrates’ court on Thursday alongside codefendant Cagdas Duran, 37. The defendants, who are both directors of the Target Food Store on Alfreton Road in Radford, Nottingham, were remanded in custody to face extradition proceedings.
A judge in Genoa, Italy, ordered the pre-trial detention of the pair along with three other alleged gang members held in Italy and Poland. According to the European Public Prosecutor’s Office, the cigarette smugglers used a number of complex maritime routes to evade customs.
The cargo originated in Armenia, going through Dubai and on to Spain before entering Italy at the port of Genoa. Other routes passed through Georgia, Kenya, the Netherlands and Turkey, as the gang attempted to conceal the true origin of the illegal goods.
The organisation had established a network of accomplices across the world, and the cigarettes were destined for the black market in the UK and other European nations.
They allegedly claimed they were shipping building materials and used containers with false bottoms to hide their illegal cargo. A corrupt IT specialist is said to have created and managed fake websites and emails as a front for the network while the plotters used sophisticated encrypted phones to avoid law enforcement.
The market value of the seized goods in Italy is estimated at around £15million, a figure that could have tripled had they reached the UK. Baybasin is understood to be a member of a notorious family that founded the Hackney Bombers organised crime gang in north east London.
Huseyin Baybasin, 68, became known as “Europe’s Pablo Escobar” when he masterminded the export of vast quantities of heroin while leading the network in the 1990s. The group has been locked in a bloody war with the rival Tottenham Turks gang that has seen at least a dozen murders.
A leading figure of the Bombers was the intended target of a shooting at a restaurant in Dalston, North East London, in May 2024 that left a nine-year-old girl with a bullet lodged in her head.
Six weeks later, senior Tottenham Turks member Izzet Eren, 41, was shot and killed outside a cafe in Chisinau, Moldova, in what is believed to be a tit-for-tat attack.
The Bombers, or Bombacilar as they are known in Turkish, acquired a fearsome reputation when it was run by Huseyin Baybasin and two brothers, known as “The Family”.
Huseyin was arrested in Holland while his brother Abdullah, 64, who was confined to a wheelchair after being shot by a rival in the 1980s, arrived in Britain via Gibraltar in 1997.
Third brother Mehmet, 60, worked with Liverpool gangs to import vast quantities of cocaine into the UK from Latin America. Mehmet, who lived in Edgware, Middlesex, travelled to South America regularly for meetings with representatives of Colombian and Venezuelan cartels.
He is currently serving a 30-year sentence in Whitemoor prison, Cambs, for attempting to import 40 tonnes of cocaine after he was jailed in Liverpool in 2011.
Huseyin, a Kurd, has been in custody in Holland since 1998, and has now been cleared to work on his return to society by the Advisory Board for Long-Term Sentences.
Abdullah’s son Cagdas Baybasin was repeatedly shot in Düsseldorf, Germany in January. Abdullah was jailed in London for 22 years in 2006 for supplying heroin and later deported.
