Mehmet Ali Yaprak (1949 in

Nizip Nizip (; ) is a municipality and district of Gaziantep Province, Turkey. Its area is 944 km2, and its population is 148,386 (2022). It is located 45 km from the city of Gaziantep, 95 km from Şanlıurfa (Edessa), and 35 km fro ...

– 4 January 2004) was a Turkish businessman and drug trafficker, who was involved in the

Susurluk scandal The Susurluk scandal () or Susurluk accident (), was a 1996 political scandal in Turkey that exposed a close relationship between the Turkish government, the ultra-nationalistic paramilitary Grey Wolves (organization), Grey Wolves organization an ...

. He died in Kartal Prison in January 2004 after falling into a

diabetic coma Diabetic coma is a life-threatening but reversible form of coma found in people with diabetes mellitus. Three different types of diabetic coma are identified: #Severe diabetic hypoglycemia, low blood sugar in a diabetic person #Diabetic ketoac ...

. Yaprak was kidnapped on 25 April 1996 and released a week later. He was a major figure in the

captagon Fenethylline ( BAN, USAN) or fenetylline (INN) is a codrug of amphetamine and theophylline and so a mutual prodrug of both. It is also spelled phenethylline; other names for it are amphetaminoethyltheophylline and amfetyline. The drug was mar ...

trade. Yaprak was ostensibly a businessman with a television channel (Yaprak TV), a radio station, and a tourism company (Hidayet Turizm). However, he also led a feared gang that smuggled Captagon via Syria and Saudi Arabia, according to the

MİT report. His tourism company facilitated the trafficking. The report says that Yaprak donated 500 billion Lira to support

Mehmet Ağar Mehmet Kemal Ağar (born on 30 October 1951) is a Turkish former police chief, politician, government minister and leader of the Democratic Party. He was a police officer who rose to General Director of the General Directorate of Security (effec ...

's electoral campaign. Upon learning of Yaprak's wealth,

Abdullah Çatlı Abdullah Çatlı (1 June 1956 – 3 November 1996) was a Turkish secret government agent, as well as a contract killer for the National Intelligence Organization (MİT). He led the Grey Wolves, the youth branch of the Nationalist Movement Party ...

and a team of 6–7 dressed in police uniform kidnapped Yaprak on 25 May 1996 and took him to a house in Siverek belonging to the Bucak clan. The kidnapping, motivated by the desire to know where the Captagon was coming from and cut Topal out of the loop, was directed by police in Ankara. Yaprak paid 10 million DM in ransom, however Çatlı and his fellow kidnappers received only a small portion of this. When they found out that they had been cheated, they fell out with their overlords in Ankara. They then kidnapped Yaprak a second time and interrogated him, sending one copy of the interrogation tape to Bucak and another to Eymür through MİT agent Müfit Sement. Leveraging the tapes, Çatlı worked out an agreement with Ankara. Yaprak was convicted in 1997 for involvement in the assassination of Gaziantep Bar lawyer Burhan Veli Torun, and released due to an amnesty law (). In 2002, he was re-imprisoned after being caught with 5 million pills of Captagon. He died in prison, January 2004.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Yaprak, Mehmet Ali 1949 births 2004 deaths People from Nizip Turkish drug traffickers 20th-century Turkish businesspeople