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Erdogan Dismisses Mob Head’s Claims as ‘Plot’ Against Turkey

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan addresses members of his ruling AK Party during a meeting at the parliament in Ankara. (Reuters)
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan addresses members of his ruling AK Party during a meeting at the parliament in Ankara. (Reuters)
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Erdogan Dismisses Mob Head’s Claims as ‘Plot’ Against Turkey

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan addresses members of his ruling AK Party during a meeting at the parliament in Ankara. (Reuters)
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan addresses members of his ruling AK Party during a meeting at the parliament in Ankara. (Reuters)

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday said a series of severe allegations made against members of his entourage by a fugitive mafia boss were a plot against Turkey. He vowed to fight criminal gangs.

In a stream of videos posted on social media in recent weeks, convicted mob leader Sedat Peker has made stunning claims against ruling party figures that include alleged corruption, drug trafficking and a murder cover-up — maintaining there were close ties between senior officials and the underworld.

Peker has not so far produced documentary evidence to back up his allegations. His accusations have targeted Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu, the son of former prime minister Binali Yildirim, and a convicted former interior minister as well as his son, who is a legislator from Erdogan’s ruling party.

The YouTube videos, which have hit millions of views, have led to opposition calls for Soylu’s resignation and for prosecutors to investigate Peker’s claims.

Breaking his weeks-long silence over the allegations, Erdogan described them as a “devious operation” targeting the country and his rule.

“We will spoil these games, these plots. No one should doubt that we will disrupt this devious operation,” Erdogan said, in an address to members of his ruling party.

“We pursue members of criminal gangs wherever in the world they flee to. We will not leave these criminals alone until we bring them back to our country and hand them over to the judiciary,” he said.

In his latest video released on Sunday, the 49-year-old crime boss who has been in and out of prison in Turkey, claimed that Yildirim’s son, Erkam Yildirim, had traveled to Venezuela to stake out possible narcotics smuggling routes.

Binali Yildirim firmly denied the allegation, insisting that his son, who owns a shipping company, had traveled to Caracas on a humanitarian mission to hand out COVID-19 testing kits and masks.

In the video, the crime boss also claimed to have had a close relationship with Interior Minister Soylu, who allegedly provided him with a security detail and warned him about an investigation into his group. Peker also claimed that Soylu had sought his help in a bid to defeat a rival group within the ruling party, which is led by Erdogan’s son-in-law.

Soylu has denied the claims in television interviews and has filed a criminal complaint against Peker.

Erdogan said Wednesday he firmly stands by Soylu and Yildirim.

Ahmet Davutoglu, an opposition party leader and former Erdogan ally who had served under him as prime minister from 2014 to 2016, called for a parliamentary investigation into the allegations and questioned the president’s support for Soylu.

“If President Tayyip Erdogan believes in Soylu’s innocence, he should have said this on the first day. Not after 25 days,” Davutoglu said.

Other allegations by Peker have targeted former interior minister Mehmet Agar, and his son Tolga Agar, a lawmaker from the ruling Justice and Development Party. Peker claimed Tolga Agar was involved in the suspicious death of a Kazakh journalism student, Yeldana Kaharman, who had interviewed him and that her death was covered up as suicide following an alleged rape. The legislator rejects the accusation.

In continued allegations against the Agar family, the mob leader said Mehmet Agar was behind a series of political killings in the 1990s. Mehmet Agar had also, Peker claimed, illegally appropriated the marina in the upscale Aegean resort of Yalikavak from an Azerbaijani-Turkish businessman. Agar claimed that he had saved the marina from falling into the hands of crime gangs.

Peker’s revelations have raised concerns over possible continued ties between state officials and illegal gangs. To many, they come has a grim reminder of the 1990s when Turkey was rocked by a scandal that was triggered by a car crash. The road accident in western Turkey killed a police chief and a wanted mafia hitman, and injured a member of Turkey’s parliament — all riding in the same car — and revealed shady links between state actors and the underworld.

Peker is believed to have fled Turkey last year after getting wind of an operation against his group.

It is unclear why the mafia boss — who has supported Erdogan by organizing political rallies in his favor and by making threats against his opponents — has turned against the government.

Peker maintains that he was forced to speak out after his wife and two daughters were allegedly mistreated during a police raid on their home.

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Japan Marks 80th Anniversary of WWII Surrender as Concern Grows About Fading Memory

Japan's Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, left, walks to deliver a speech as Japan's Emperor Naruhito and Empress Masako attend a memorial service marking the 80th anniversary of Japan's World War II defeat, at the Nippon Budokan hall Friday, Aug. 15, 2025, in Tokyo. (AP)
Japan's Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, left, walks to deliver a speech as Japan's Emperor Naruhito and Empress Masako attend a memorial service marking the 80th anniversary of Japan's World War II defeat, at the Nippon Budokan hall Friday, Aug. 15, 2025, in Tokyo. (AP)
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Japan Marks 80th Anniversary of WWII Surrender as Concern Grows About Fading Memory

Japan's Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, left, walks to deliver a speech as Japan's Emperor Naruhito and Empress Masako attend a memorial service marking the 80th anniversary of Japan's World War II defeat, at the Nippon Budokan hall Friday, Aug. 15, 2025, in Tokyo. (AP)
Japan's Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, left, walks to deliver a speech as Japan's Emperor Naruhito and Empress Masako attend a memorial service marking the 80th anniversary of Japan's World War II defeat, at the Nippon Budokan hall Friday, Aug. 15, 2025, in Tokyo. (AP)

Japan is paying tribute to more than 3 million war dead as the country marks its surrender 80 years ago, ending the World War II, as concern grows about the rapidly fading memories of the tragedy of war and the bitter lessons from the era of Japanese militarism.

Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba expressed “remorse” over the war, which he called a mistake, restoring the word in a Japanese leader's Aug. 15 address for the first time since 2013, when former premier Shinzo Abe shunned it.

Ishiba, however, did not mention Japan's aggression across Asia or apologize.

“We will never repeat the tragedy of the war. We will never go the wrong way,” Ishiba said. “Once again, we must deeply keep to our hearts the remorse and lesson from that war.”

In a national ceremony Friday at Tokyo's Budokan hall, about 4,500 officials and bereaved families and their descendants from around the country observed a moment of silence at noon, the time when the then-emperor's surrender speech began on Aug. 15, 1945.

Just a block away at Yasukuni Shrine, seen by Asian neighbors as a symbol of militarism, dozens of Japanese rightwing politicians and their supporters came to pray.

Ishiba stayed away from Yasukuni and sent a religious ornament as a personal gesture instead of praying at the controversial shrine.

But Shinjiro Koizumi, the agriculture minister considered as a top candidate to replace the beleaguered prime minister, prayed at the shrine. Koizumi, the son of popular former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi whose Yasukuni visit as a serving leader in 2001 outraged China, is a regular at the shrine.

Rightwing lawmakers, including former economic security ministers Sanae Takaichi and Takayuki Kobayashi, as well as governing Liberal Democratic Party heavyweight Koichi Hagiuda, also visited the shrine Friday.

The shrine honors convicted war criminals, among about 2.5 million war dead. Victims of Japanese aggression, especially China and the Koreas, see visits to the shrine as a lack of remorse about Japan's wartime past.

Japanese emperors have stopped visiting the Yasukuni site since the enshrinement of top war criminals there in 1978.

Emperor Naruhito, in his address at the Budokan memorial Friday, expressed his earnest hope that the ravages of war will never be repeated while “reflecting on our past and bearing in mind the feelings of deep remorse.”

Naruhito reiterated the importance of telling the war’s tragic history and the ordeals faced during and after the war to younger generations as “we continue to seek the peace and happiness of the people in the future.”

As part of the 80th anniversary remembrance, he has traveled to Iwo Jima, Okinawa and Hiroshima, and is expected to visit Nagasaki with his daughter, Princess Aiko, in September.

Hajime Eda, whose father died on his way home from Korea when his ship was hit by a mine, said he will never forget his father and others who never made it home. In his speech representing the bereaved families, Eda said it is Japan's responsibility to share the lesson — the emptiness of the conflict, the difficulty of reconstruction and the preciousness of peace.

There was some hope at the ceremony, with a number of teenagers participating after learning about their great-grandfathers who died in the battlefields.

Among them, Ami Tashiro, a 15-year-old high school student from Hiroshima, said she joined a memorial marking the end of the battle on Iwo Jima in April after reading a letter her great-grandfather sent from the island. She also hopes to join in the search for his remains.

As the population of wartime generations rapidly decline, Japan faces serious questions on how it should pass on the wartime history to the next generation, as the country has already faced revisionist pushbacks under Abe and his supporters in the 2010s.

Since 2013, Japanese prime ministers stopped apologizing to Asian victims, under the precedent set by Abe.

Some lawmakers' denial of Japan's military role in massive civilian deaths on Okinawa or the Nanking Massacre have stirred controversy.

In an editorial Friday, the Mainichi newspaper noted that Japan's pacifist principle was mostly about staying out of global conflict, rather than thinking how to make peace, and called the country to work together with Asian neighbors as equal partners.

“It's time to show a vision toward ‘a world without war’ based on the lesson from its own history,” the Mainichi said.