Mekin Büyükdeniz was recovering from a recent assassination attempt when a hitman infiltrated his hospital ward in a highly coordinated early-morning attack and fatally shot him.
An alleged Turkish crime syndicate leader who survived an assassination attempt some two weeks earlier was fatally shot inside a Spanish hospital room early Thursday in a highly coordinated hit.
Catalonia’s regional police force, the Mossos d’Esquadra, announced they are investigating the fatal shooting of an admitted patient at a hospital in Tarragona. While police placed the case under a judicial secrecy order, a law enforcement source confirmed to OCCRP that the victim was Mekin Büyükdeniz, a member of the Ten Brothers criminal group.
According to Turkish media, the Küçükçekmece Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office formally named Büyükdeniz in prosecutorial filings as the operational leader of the so-called “10 Brothers” gang. In the organizational hierarchy documented in the prosecutor’s investigation, the syndicate was identified as a family-centered armed network directed by the Büyükdeniz brothers.
The meticulously timed execution occurred around 3:15 a.m., just ten minutes after Büyükdeniz was transferred from intensive care to a regular room on the hospital’s fifth floor, Sabah reported. To create a diversion, an accomplice allegedly distracted hospital security by sexually harassing a nurse. This allowed a helmeted gunman on an electric scooter to slip through the emergency room entrance, go directly to Büyükdeniz’s room, and shoot him three times in the head and body in front of his wife. Following the attack, his wife was placed under police protection, the outlet noted.
Büyükdeniz was recovering at the Joan XXIII Hospital following an October 16 drive-by shooting in the nearby coastal town of Salou, where a gunman fired 10 shots and wounded him in the legs. According to Sabah, Büyükdeniz had refused to give a statement to police and brought in a private bodyguard from Turkey. Assessing that the security risk had dropped, local law enforcement removed his police protection just before the attack.
Following Thursday’s assassination, the hitman reportedly escaped through the hospital’s garbage collection area. Catalan police immediately activated an emergency protocol, setting up roadblocks across Tarragona and Catalonia to hunt for the suspects, Sabah reported.
The Mossos d’Esquadra confirmed that their Criminal Investigation Division (DIC) has taken over the probe. Emergency services also activated a psychological support team for the hospital staff.
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