Heroin dealer was secret informer for Customs and Excise

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.

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