SLAIN B.C. GANGSTERS CAUGHT UP IN INTERNATIONAL MURDER PLOT.
TWO YOUNG GANGSTERS KILLED IN B.C. WERE BIT PLAYERS IN A DEADLY FIGHT BETWEEN IRANIAN-TURKISH DRUG DEALERS
Turkish drug trafficker Cetin Koc was sitting in a car in one of Dubai’s most luxurious neighbourhoods, beside shiny towers that are among the tallest high-rises in the world, when two hit men ran up and blasted away.
It was May 4, 2016. The Iranian-born Turkish national was hit seven times in the head and twice more in his chest and hand by Russianand Austrian-made guns equipped with silencers. Koc died instantly, his car engine still running.
The hit men — alleged to be Metro Vancouver residents Harpreet Singh Majhu and Orosman Jr. Garcia-Arevalo — raced to the airport in a rented vehicle, apparently getting into a fender bender en route. They were on a plane back to Canada before Dubai police had even identified them as suspects.
But they weren’t out of the woods. Within days, authorities in the United Arab Emirates provided the RCMP with the names of the young gang-involved men, identifying them as suspected killers.
There were brief news stories in the Canadian media at the time about two unidentified suspects in the Dubai murders. The RCMP refused to comment then and has said nothing since.
But a Postmedia investigation has uncovered disturbing details of an international murder plot that stretches from Turkey to the fields of the Fraser Valley, where the bodies of both Majhu and Garcia-Arevalo would be found within weeks of Koc’s murder.
The Canadian assassins are alleged to have been hired on behalf of Naji Sharifi Zindashti, an Iranian-born drug lord based in Turkey.
Garcia-Arevalo was shot to death on May 11, 2016, and his body dumped in an Abbotsford, B.C., blueberry field. His murder remains unsolved.
Majhu’s remains were found in a burnt-out vehicle in Agassiz , B.C., on June 10, 2016, Postmedia has learned. The Integrated Homicide Investigation Team has never revealed that a body was found that day, let alone released the identity of the victim. But sources confirmed that Majhu also met an untimely fate, which is believed to be a result of his role in the Dubai slaying.
So how did two Lower Mainland men with gang links end up allegedly involved in a targeted assassination half a world away?
Majhu, born in 1990, was raised in Delta, B.C., and attended North Delta Secondary School.
He had run-ins with the police from an early age. He was charged with mischief under $5,000 in Surrey in October 2009. He was also charged with breaching a court order. He was convicted in July 2011 on both counts and handed a year of probation and a five-year ban on possessing firearms.
In 2012, he was charged with trafficking, dangerous operation of a motor vehicle, flight from a police officer, resisting police and assaulting police. He got a conditional sentence, which he’s alleged to have breached in January 2013 and again in May 2014.
On Boxing Day 2012, he was arrested and charged with drug trafficking in Delta.
In May 2014, while out on bail, Vancouver police arrested and charged him with dangerous operation of a motor vehicle. He was convicted of a lesser count — driving without due care and attention — fined $500 and banned from driving for 11 months.
On Sept. 10, 2014, he was arrested by the gang squad and charged with another count of trafficking.
In November 2015 — seven months before his murder — he was convicted of both the 2012 and 2014 drug charges and sentenced to three months in jail.
Before he went to Dubai, Majhu had joined other young gangsters and traffickers to form the Brothers Keepers — a group aligned with the Red Scorpions that has split apart and turned on itself over the past year.
Garcia-Arevalo was an associate of the Brothers Keepers, aligned with what would become the breakaway Kang group. He had his own history with police.
Born in 1993, Garcia-Arevalo pleaded guilty in 2013 to two counts of driving without a licence in North Vancouver and Vancouver. He got a year’s driving suspension.
In August 2014, he was charged with trafficking in Delta. He was convicted, sentenced to 101 days in jail and received a 10-year firearms prohibition.He was also sentenced to 14 days in jail for a third conviction of driving while prohibited.
In February 2015, he was charged again with trafficking in Surrey during the previous summer. The count was still outstanding at the time of his murder and was “abated” or dropped by a Crown prosecutor in November 2016.
Sources say Majhu and Garcia-Arevalo had been running a drug line together.
Police in B.C. would not comment on their theory about how two young gangsters with minor records got recruited for an international hit.
In fact, after months of Postmedia requesting an interview with investigators about the Majhu and Garcia-Arevalo murders and their international links, the RCMP would only provide a brief emailed statement that left many unanswered questions.
“Whether it’s recruitment of a young person in B.C. for drug trafficking or internationally, it’s all the same,” Sgt. Janelle Shoihet said in the statement. “It’s the lure of material possessions, the greed, the appeal to the sense of adventure and freedom but inevitably the end result is tragic.”
She said IHIT is working with the RCMP’s major crime section on the B.C. murder cases.
She would not say why the existence of Majhu’s murder was withheld from the public for more than two years and then only confirmed in response to Postmedia queries. Garcia-Arevalo’s body was found by an Abbotsford farmer and was therefore covered by the media at the time.
Friends and relatives of the two B.C. men did not respond to requests by Postmedia for interviews.
Some lamented their loss on social media. “I miss your laugh bro, I wish I could hear it one more time,” one of Garcia-Arevalo’s friends said on Facebook.
Zindashti, believed to have ordered the Koc hit and a suspect in murders in other countries, is notorious.
In April, he was picked up in Istanbul in a police sweep that used drones to track him and other suspects. According to the state-run Anadolu Agency, he is charged with “voluntary killing by planning,” while his associates face counts of aiding a criminal organization.
The trail of death linked to Zindashti tracks back to June 2014 when Greek police and the U.S. DEA seized two tonnes of heroin purportedly owned by Koc and fellow smuggler Orhan Ungan, according to Turkish news reports.
The rival drug lords believed it was Zindashti who tipped off the DEA.
So, the story goes, they plotted revenge.
Zindashti’s luxury SUV was targeted by hit men in Istanbul on Sept. 26, 2014. His 19-year-old daughter Arvu was killed, as was his 25-year-old driver-nephew. Ungan and several associates were charged in the double slaying.
It was Zindashti’s turn to retaliate. Part of the plot to avenge his daughter’s death was to take out Koc in Dubai in May 2016 using the Canadian killers, police allege.
The violence didn’t stop there.
Ungan’s lawyer was shot to death in an Istanbul restaurant on Oct. 31, 2017 — the same day Ungan testified at his own trial that Zindashti had been a secret witness years earlier in trials against prominent Turkish secularists.
News reports said Ungan testified that Zindashti connected with the DEA while in jail in 2009 through U.S. consulate worker Metin Topuz. Topuz is now jailed in Turkey as a supporter of Fethullah Gulen, the U.S.-based preacher that Turkey blames for the failed coup in 2016.
Ryan Gingeras, an associate professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., is an expert on organized crime in Turkey.
He said there are many non-Turkish drug smugglers who, like Zindashti, use the country straddling Europe and Asia as a base of operations.
But they don’t normally make headlines like Zindashti has done.
“I think this is one of those few cases for reasons of the political connection, we know a lot more about this guy,” said Gingeras, author of Heroin, Organized Crime, and the Making of Modern Turkey.
“And I think that’s important because we don’t know a lot about the people who are sort of luminaries of organized crime in Turkey. For time immemorial, their names are not mentioned much in the press. They’re not subject to very rigorous scrutiny or prosecution. And often times, when they are, it is done within a political context.”
The fact that Zindashti has been identified as a secret witness “means he has some sort of political significance within the Turkish security services and was perhaps a past informant,” he said.
Gingeras said organized crime in the region uses family connections in other countries to extend its reach. That could be how the Canadians were recruited. “The most simple possible explanation is that family connections allowed for the recruiting of these individuals.”
Postmedia approached the Turkish government through its Canadian embassy to arrange an interview with a prosecutor on the Zindashti case. A month later, Erdogan Ozdemir, Turkey’s viceconsul in Vancouver, said the request had been denied.
The Dubai public prosecution office said the only way it could answer questions about the case was in person. “We can’t provide any information related to the cases through the email or phone call to anyone,” the office said in an email to Postmedia.
When Majhu and GarciaArevalo came back to Canada, they weren’t exactly lying low.
Sources told Postmedia that the young hit men were acting cocky, portraying themselves as international assassins and demanding a promotion in their own drug organization to reflect their new status. Others around them didn’t like how they were behaving.
Within days, Garcia-Arevalo was found by a farmer in his blueberry field in Abbotsford.
Majhu was asked by his gang to go up to Vernon, B.C., to help with the drug line there after one of their workers was badly beaten. As soon as he left town, he was grabbed and killed — his remains unceremoniously left in the charred car in Agassiz.
Their violent demise should serve as a cautionary tale to anyone looking to get involved in the gang lifestyle or presuming they can play a role in a movie-like international underworld plot, said Sgt. Brenda Winpenny, of B.C.’s anti-gang unit, the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit.
“This life isn’t a fairy tale. It does not matter whether you are involved in gang and drug activity locally or in a different country. You need to understand that there are risks to your involvement even from people within your own organization,” Winpenny said.