A STRING of shootings that have rocked the Spanish coast have been linked to warring Turkish mafias moving into Spain to get a cut of the lucrative cocaine trade.
From a shooting in an Estepona car park and a murder in a Malaga restaurant to a slaying in a Torrevieja street, the latest episode has seen a gang leader shot dead while helpless in a Tarragona hospital bed.
Mekin Buyukdeniz, 35, was killed in the early hours of October 29 in a fifth-floor room at the Joan XXIII hospital in Tarragona, where he was recovering from a previous gun attack in the nearby Costa Dorada resort of Salou 13 days earlier.
Mafia-style hit in Catalunya after man who survived drive-by shooting is executed in hospital bed days after police guard was lifted
Slain Turkish Mekin Buyukdeniz, 35, hanging out in Barcelona’s famous Shoko nightclub. Credit: Niporwifi
A killer got in through the emergency entrance and reached his room, where his partner was with him, and fired several shots before slipping out through the hospital’s waste area, leaving behind a helmet and scooter believed to be his.
Turkish authorities consider Buyukdeniz one of the leaders of a gang called 10 Kardesler (‘the Ten Brothers’), and police sources say it answers to the feared Dalton crime group, one of two Turkish gang camps that have reportedly been at war since 2025.
Hospital hit
That war has already produced a shooting in an Estepona supermarket car park in July 2025, the daylight killing of a man in Torrevieja the following month and the shooting of a rival gang figure in Malaga’s port this September.
The Mossos d’Esquadra, Catalunya’s regional police, was guarding Buyukdeniz while he was in intensive care, but protection was withdrawn after his family arrived from Turkey, and he was moved to an ordinary ward the next day.
Diari de Tarragona reported that he had repeatedly told medical staff, using a phone translator and gestures, that his life was in danger and begged not to be moved out of intensive care, where access is more tightly controlled.
Catalunya’s health minister, Olga Pane, said hospital security staff were dealing with another incident at the time of his slaying, and that it was not known whether the two were related.
But Turkish crime journalist Umit Erkan Demircan has claimed that this other incident was in fact a diversion by Buyukdeniz killers.
Incredibly, he wrote that they had staged a fake corpse smeared with blood in the hospital car park and a fake assault on a nurse in the emergency department to draw security away.
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A tale of two Turkish mafias
Based in Istanbul, 10 Kardesler is linked by Turkish authorities to drug trafficking, arms trafficking and extortion.
Police raided it across seven provinces in February, searching 61 properties and detaining 42 people, according to Turkish media reports.
Buyukdeniz reportedly escaped that raid and was already in Catalunya by the time he was shot, having been hunted by the Turkish authorities.
Diari de Tarragona reported that he made no effort to hide and appeared in photographs on social media profiles.
Two big camps have formed in the Turkish underworld since 2025, with one built around the Daltons, to whom the 10 Kardesler answer.
The other is a rival gang called the Caspers and its allies, who include Umit ‘the Gypsy’ Yalcin, the mafia leader shot in the face in a Malaga restaurant in September.
These factions are fighting for control of the drug and arms trade in Turkey, with each controlling branches that stretch across Europe.
Gang boss gunned down by Turkish mafia rivals in busy Costa Blanca tourist spot
Umit Yalcin AKA ‘the Gypsy’, who was shot in the face in a Malaga restaurant in September. Credit: El Español
The violence on Spanish soil begins
The first shooting in the trail came on May 4, 2024, when Ilmettin Aytekin, known as Tekin Kartal, was shot dead in Barcelona’s Diagonal Mar district shortly after leaving a lunch table to take a phone call.
OCCRP, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, an international network of investigative journalists, reported that Kartal had dined the night before with Abdullah Baybasin, a Turkish gangland figure, who later denied any involvement in a video statement.
The war reached the Costa del Sol on July 20, 2025, when Caner Kocer, a prominent Dalton, nearly died after a hit squad from the Caspers’ camp tried to kill him and two other men in the car park of an Aldi supermarket in the Isdabe area of Estepona.
He did not survive the next attempt: Kocer was shot dead in daylight on August 3, 2025, in Torrevieja by another three-man commando linked to the Caspers’ camp.
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Caner Kocer, who survived one attempted hit in Estepona only to be gunned down days later in Torrevieja. Credit: Social media
The Daltons blamed Yalcin, 47, for ordering that killing, and on September 22 this year he was shot at close range while dining at the Muelle Uno shopping centre in Malaga’s port, with the bullet entering and leaving his cheek, sending him to intensive care and leaving him needing facial reconstruction.
Dalton-linked Instagram profiles then filled with messages saying ‘revenge has been achieved’, apparently believing he had died, according to El Español.
Fast forward four weeks, and Buyukdeniz was hit several times on the afternoon of October 16, mostly in the legs, by shots fired from a moving car as he walked along Carrer Prat d’en Carbo in Salou.
Catalunya’s interior minister, Nuria Parlon, has suggested the attack was tied to drug-trafficking disputes.
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Guardia Civil en colaboración con la policía local de Torrevieja detienen tras una peligrosa persecución a los tres peligrosos inmigrantes implicados en el asesinato a tiros de otro inmigrante.Mismo trabajo, mismo riesgo, pero sin el mismo reconocimiento.#ProfesionDeRiesgoYa pic.twitter.com/jSBs9SDyxr— JuciL Guipúzcoa (@jucilguipuzcoa1) August 3, 2025
Why Turkish gangs are operating in Catalunya
Mossos sources told the news site Metropoli Abierta that the corridor between Barcelona and Tarragona offers ports, fast road links and an anonymous tourist and residential setting.
Turkish groups once focused on the Balkan heroin route have now branched out into South American cocaine and weapons.
The same sources said the groups use travelling hitmen who arrive on false EU identities and leave the country within hours of a killing.
Sources in the Mossos’ criminal investigation division told ARA, a Catalan news outlet, that the situation is ‘tense’, with Turkish organised crime becoming as visible as Albanian gangs have been in recent years.
But not everyone sees it that way. The Turkish consulate in Barcelona told ARA in September 2025 that it had no recent information confirming Turkish mafia activity in Catalunya.
The ‘Gypsy’ is a member of the Caspers. Credit: Social media
What police have done
In March, the Mossos and the Policia Nacional, coordinated by Europol, dismantled a Turkish-origin gang accused of smuggling weapons and drugs, making around 20 arrests with raids across Catalunya and arrests in Malaga.
Last Friday, October 30, police stopped a car in Tortosa, a town in southern Catalunya, and arrested a 28-year-old Turkish man from Alicante who was wanted over the Salou shooting.
A Tarragona court freed him provisionally over the weekend even though prosecutors had asked for him to be jailed.
He remains under investigation for attempted murder, illegal possession of weapons and belonging to a criminal organisation.
He was identified on October 16 in a hire car rented in Elche with three other Turkish men living in Alicante province, none of whom were arrested then.
Investigators are examining whether the hospital gunman could be one of those four men, though there is no public confirmation that he is.
What is still not known
The Mossos’ criminal investigation division has taken over the case and has not identified the gunman or established a motive, with its main line of inquiry a possible link between the two Tarragona-area attacks and rivalry between criminal groups.
Police have not said that the shootings in Estepona, Torrevieja, Malaga and Tarragona belong to a single feud.
The hospital killing remains under judicial secrecy, and no one has been arrested for it.
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