Contract killers as young as 15 recruited to do drug syndicates’ dirty work

Santre Sanchez Gayle, from Kensal Rise, north London, was just 15 when he murdered Gulistan Subasi at her home in Clapton. Photograph: Metropolitan police/PA

This article titled “Contract killers as young as 15 recruited to do drug syndicates’ dirty work” was written by Sandra Laville, crime correspondent, for The Guardian on Thursday 26th May 2011 20.03 UTC

To the killers who recruited him, teenager Santre Sanchez Gayle was cheap, disposable and, most importantly, unconnected to them in any way. His role in the murder of a young Turkish mother has uncovered an emerging pattern in which powerful crime syndicates hire children to do their dirty work.

Gayle, pictured below, a disaffected black teenager from north-west London, is beginning a 20-year sentence for murder this week after gunning down Gulistan Subasi, 26, in a professional hit for which he was paid £200. At the time he carried out the killing he was just 15.

However, the people who planned the killing of Subasi, pictured right, remain at large, and police inquires have focused on members of one of the biggest Turkish crime syndicates in the UK, a gang which has controlled up to 90% of the heroin entering the country.

Subasi’s shooting on her doorstep in Hackney was one of a spate of killings connected to Turkish organised criminal gangs in north London. In all cases, police inquiries have uncovered similarities in the murders: the use of young black teenagers as hired assassins.

“It is an established methodology that has emerged during the inquiries into these killings,” said a police source. “Each has a similar modus operandi, and it is clearly the case that, in order to distance themselves from the murders, these Turkish gangs are using these young men to do their work for them.

“They are seen as disposable and they have no connections to the Turkish groups. They are hired through middle men to keep the distance and make sure there are no connections between the killer and those who hired him. In the case of Gayle and other young boys like him, their lives are ruined, but those who hired them remain at large.”

On the same night that Subasi was killed in March 2009, Ahmet Paytak, a 50-year-old shopkeeper from Holloway, north London, was murdered in the doorway of Euro Wine and Food, his grocery store, by a gunman riding pillion on a motorbike. Paytak’s 21-year-old son, Husyein, was shot in the leg as he turned to face the killer.

Paytak, a family man, was an innocent victim of rivalry between Turkish gangs over the distribution of heroin in the capital. His death led to more bloodshed. In October 2009, Oktay Erbasli, 23 – said to be a prominent member of a crime gang known as the Tottenham Boys – was shot dead as he waited in a Range Rover at traffic lights at a busy junction. His five-year-old stepson seated beside him escaped unhurt.

Within three days there was retaliation with the killing in Clapton, east London of Cem Duzgun, 21, who had been playing snooker in a social club with friends when two hooded men approached him and opened fire with a semi-automatic weapon.

Apart from Gayle, only one man has been convicted in connection with these four killings. Last November, Michael James, 31 was found guilty of the murder of Paytak and the attempted murder of his son. It was James who had driven the stolen motorbike used in the murder, but his pillion passenger, who fired the fatal shots, has never been caught. In all cases, those who organised the killings have escaped justice.

Within Gayle’s community in Kensal Green, north London, his conviction this week has caused anger and concern. The same jury that convicted the teenager found Subasi’s estranged husband, Serdar Ozbek, not guilty of murder.

Police are still hunting Ozbek’s brother Hussain, who has fled from the UK and is thought to be in Turkey. Crucial evidence heard in court revealed that Gayle sent a text message to Hussain shortly after he killed Subasi.

Gayle, a troubled teenager who dealt in cannabis and ran with a street gang known as the Kensal Green Boys, was expelled from schools and attended a pupil-referral unit in Brent. Until he murdered Subasi, however, his criminality had been confined to cannabis dealing and attempted robbery.

Tunde Banjoko, chief executive of Leap, a charity working with black and minority ethnic young people, said: “It is very worrying and there is a lot of anger about this.

“You have to ask why a 15-year-old black teenager from Kensal Green kills a woman he has never met and has nothing to do with? If this is a trend, then I would like to have this discussion out there because it is horrifying.”

Sentencing Gayle, Judge Stephen Kramer made it clear there were others who had planned the killing.

“It’s been submitted you were an easily led, immature youngster who, if money was involved was capable of violence.” Nevertheless, he said, the teenager had been responsible for what amounted to “an efficient, ruthless and clinical execution”.

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