Authorities announced Tuesday that 213 suspects have been arrested in a massive drug bust. Operations, launched in the southeastern province of Diyarbakır, spread to nine other provinces and led to the detention of several drug dealers.
Flanked by police and military officers, Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu held a press conference at police headquarters in Diyarbakır in the early hours of Tuesday as the security forces were still rounding up suspects. Soylu dubbed the raids “Operation Wipeout” and said it was a culmination of an investigation and surveillance work that started eight months ago under the Chief Prosecutor’s Office in Diyarbakır.
Some 4,200 police and gendarmerie officers, aided by helicopters and drones, stormed dozens of locations, seizing drugs, guns as well as evidence linking some suspects to the terrorist group PKK.
The minister hailed the operation as a "success" and said their efforts in the field to uncover the network of drug dealers succeeded. “In Diyarbakır, we identified each dealer, drug baron or baroness,” he said, some two hours after the first raid was carried out. Soylu did not give the exact amount of drugs seized or captured suspects but said they confiscated heroin, methamphetamine and cocaine. “What matters more now is that we detained senior members of (drug network) who tried to poison Diyarbakır.” He noted that a "narco-terrorism" operation was also underway, as the “second chapter” of an earlier operation to clamp down on terrorist groups profiting from the drug trade.
He noted that they seized “rags of a terrorist group (PKK)” (a name used to describe PKK flags by officials) as well as AK-47 rifles, commonly used by the terrorist group, during the raids. “Certainly, they have this dark habit of financing terrorism by drugs. In the past years, we started launching operations not just on drug dealers but also those who earn profits for terrorist groups by selling, producing drugs,” he said.
