Beytullah Gündüz plotted to kill a man whose family he had accused of paying £100,000 to a rival gang, the Old Bailey heard.
A senior member of the Hackney Bombacılar gang (dubbed the ‘Hackney Turks’ by British media) has been jailed for life for conspiring to murder a man who was shot outside his family’s Dalston restaurant.
Beytullah Gündüz, 40, was sentenced at the Old Bailey on Friday, 25 September, and must serve at least 20 years before he can be considered for release. A jury found him guilty in June of conspiring to murder Onur Güzel.
Mr Güzel was shot in the torso while taking a break from work outside Umut 2000 on 20 June 2025. He survived but suffered serious injuries, spent four weeks in hospital and required a stoma bag until a further operation this month. The gunman, named in court as Dogan Over, fled to Istanbul.
The court heard that Gündüz had wrongly accused Mr Güzel’s family of paying £100,000 to the rival Tottenham Boys, another London-based Turkish-Kurdish criminal gang, and demanded the same sum from them.
Prosecutor Corrine Bramwell said Gündüz was “at the heart of extorting Mr Guzel and indeed the local community”.
Sentencing him, Judge Mark Lucraft KC described the shooting as part of a long-running series of retaliatory attacks between the two gangs. He said Mr Güzel was another person outside the feuding groups to suffer life-changing injuries, and that the attack was motivated by financial gain.
Gündüz did not attend the sentencing hearing; his barrister said he feared being attacked.
The case follows another Dalston shooting in May 2024, when a gunman opened fire towards men outside a restaurant, injuring three of them and a nine-year-old girl eating ice cream with her family. The girl was left with a bullet lodged in her brain. Gündüz had left the restaurant shortly before that attack. Javon Riley was jailed last year for his role in it.
