A nationwide operation on Tuesday led to the detention of 400 suspects out of 502 wanted by authorities in connection with organized crime. Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu revealed the details of “Operation Roller” in the early hours at a press conference as police raided several locations simultaneously in 50 provinces.
The operation was among the biggest in recent memory against organized crime gangs across the country. Soylu announced that police arrested 842 people in 211 separate operations against organized crime since January, with 2,703 detained.
In the past two years, Turkish police launched a new wave of operations against organized crime networks and entirely eliminated 66 of them, whose members were rounded up in nationwide operations.
“We will be merciless toward organized crime, regardless of the scope of their illegal activities. We cannot allow them to harm our citizens,” Soylu said at the press conference.
Operation Roller targeted 18 organized crime gangs and another 55 gangs accused of supplying weapons to them. Gangs were involved in a wide range of crimes from loan sharking to drug smuggling, bribery to win public tenders to extortion. One gang involved in loan sharking forced people indebted to sign empty debt bonds at gunpoint and resorted to violence when the debtors failed to pay their debts back. Soylu said their victims who received threats were driven to suicide. The minister said among the victims of gangs was a woman who was beaten and raped when she was accused of stealing drugs from a gang. Another gang was accused of driving businesses to bankruptcy if their owners rejected paying for extortion, by damaging their property and driving away customers by conducting armed raids to the venues.
The fight against organized crime is a priority for the Interior Ministry, where mobsters had gotten away with lenient sentences and had close ties to prominent figures, including politicians and intelligence services, in the past. Until the late 1990s, gang shootings were common, especially in big cities. Though the killings continued into the 2000s, mafia figures of past decades appear to have lost power, with many in jail. In the past six years, security forces ended the activities of 358 criminal gangs, including 30 operating nationwide, through continuous operations.
