THE shooting to death of two men in a brawl over casino debts in occupied Karavas on Wednesday night has prompted a debate over gambling in the north.
The Turkish Cypriot leadership has already closed down the two casinos involved and seven people have been arrested.
Kibrisli newspaper said that a meeting would take place between Turkish Cypriot leader Mehmet Ali Talat, ‘Prime Minister’ Ferdi Sabit Soyer, the police and the ‘ministries’ concerned with public order.
Sources told the paper that Talat and Soyer were determined to take all the necessary measures in the struggle against the mafia operating in the north.
On Wednesday night, the brawl began between the employees of the Grand Ruby Casino and Deniz Kizi Hotel. Reports say it was over a gambling debt incurred by one against the other amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
According to Kibris, the owner of Grand Ruby Casino, Yasar Oz gambled at the Deniz Kizi Casino and lost $250,000. The debt was reduced to $200,000 after a deal was struck, but Oz did not pay the money.
The administrator of Deniz Kizi Casino, Idris Melih Turgut visited the Grand Ruby Casino with his bodyguards and, after a quarrel, guns were drawn.
Musa Cakmak and Huseyin Donmez, who were seriously injured, died later in hospital while a third person, Necdet Kaan Kanmaz, was also injured slightly.
Yasar Oz was one of the people arrested, and according to Afrika, had been convicted in the Susurluk case in Turkey.
In 1996 in Susurluk, the bodies of an MP, a police chief, a beauty queen and her lover, a top Turkish gangster and hitman called Abdullah Catli, were pulled from a car wreck. In the car authorities found pistols with silencers, machine guns, and false diplomatic passports.
Oz served four years because of the Susurluk case, and another 15 years for drug trafficking.
Under the headline “Northern Cyprus is a nest of mafia”, Afrika described Wednesday’s shooting as “bloody settling of accounts of Susurluk suspects who made their life in northern Cyprus”.
“Who protects them and who made them administrators of a casino?” the paper said.
CNN Turk also said Yasar Oz was “a well-known name in the underground world”, and the administrator of Deniz Kizi Casino, Melih Turgut was known by the nickname “Kurt Ahmet” in Turkey. It said he was involved in the incident of the killing of another man in 1993.
Afrika questioned previous comments by Soyer that “the doors of the TRNC were open for everyone who wants to conduct business”.
“Mr Soyer promised freedom to everyone who ‘conforms to the rules of the democratic law’,” the paper said.
Mustafa Akinci, the leader of the Peace and Democracy Movement said the Turkish Cypriot leadership had been warned the north would be “turned into Texas”.
