Three gang members jailed after DJ kidnapped, tortured and beaten to death
Three gang members have been jailed for their part in the kidnap, torture and horrific killing of a popular radio DJ.
Mehmet Koray Alpergin, 43, a Turkish radio station owner, and his girlfriend, Gozde Dalbudak, were bundled into the back of a van in October 2022.
The couple had been dining out at a restaurant in Mayfair when they were dragged to a wine bar backing onto White Hart Lane.
Gozde, 34, spent two days locked inside a toilet cubicle with nothing to do other than listen to her captors beat her boyfriend to death in the Stadium Lounge.
Mehmet suffered 94 separate injuries, many consistent with being battered by a baseball bat or having hot water thrown on him, before his body was found dumped in an Essex woodland.
Gozde, however, was set free. She flew back to Turkey, having only been in the UK for the first time only three days before the incident.
The Tottenham Turks, an organised crime group network in north London, were behind the attack, London’s top court heard.
Dylan Weatherley, 20, from Tottenham, north London, was found guilty of the manslaughter of Mehmet and his kidnap and false imprisonment.
He was today jailed at the Old Bailey for five years which will be added to a sentence he is already serving for a separate conspiracy to murder for which he received life with a minimum term of 16 years.
Kyrie Mitchell-Peart, 33, from Barnet, who had pleaded guilty to the kidnap and false imprisonment of Mehmet and his girlfriend, was sentenced to six years and four months.
Painter and decorator Isay Stoyanov, 44, from Seven Sisters in north London, was found guilty of perverting the course of justice and jailed for 18 months. He had told the court he was only at the restaurant where the couple were held to mop up after a wedding.
The court heard how Mehmet, a father of two, was a well-known figure in London’s Turkish community.
His captors, however, thought he knew the whereabouts of drugs or money in a plot orchestrated by the Tottenham Turks crime group.
He was strangled with a ligature, struck with a baseball bat breaking 14 ribs, scalded with boiling water, stabbed on the feet and subjected to internal wounds.
‘It is obvious that, before his death, Koray Alpergin had been stripped naked and horrifically tortured,’ prosecutor Crispin Aylett KC told jurors.
Mehmet, from northern Cyprus, owned Bizim FM, which describes itself as the ‘first Turkish radio station in London’. The station’s 24-hour programming aims to ‘shed light’ on the Turkish community.
His captors knew he was driving from Enfield to Mayfair as the group had fitted his Audi with a tracking monitor, the jury was told. Eight men drove in two vehicles to the scene of the kidnapping.
Weatherley was in the Polo but Stoyanov was allegedly not in either car. There was no evidence Weatherley or Stoyanov were involved in the violence that Mehmet endured while in captivity.
Stoyanov, however, was involved in the clean-up inside the Stadium Lounge.
Following a separate trial last year, four more men had been convicted of their roles.
Two more suspects were said to be still at large and were believed to have fled abroad.
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