MET SENDS MORE OFFICERS TO CONTROL GANG WARFARE

A HUNDRED police officers have been drafted in to Britain's biggest Turkish
community in an attempt to keep the lid on a violent turf war between rival
heroin gangs. Since mid-summer, Scotland Yard has deployed 60 undercover
detectives on the streets of North London. Now another 40 officers, many of
them armed, are patrolling the area around scene of the clashes in Haringey
after a battle two weeks ago left a man dead and another 20 wounded.

In the past fortnight police have carried out 20 raids, seizing an AK47
assault rifle in one operation and intercepting a hit squad in another.

Senior officers fear that rivalry between supporters of the most powerful
Turkish drugs clan in Britain and supporters of the Kurdish PKK group will
claim the lives of bystanders on streets lined with 24-hour shops and
drinking clubs.

Detective Chief Superintendent John Coles, head of Scotland Yard's Turkish
task force, said: "The people we are dealing with are far more violent than
old-fashioned criminals. They had rules. They never involved the public.
Today, any gang rivalry can catch innocent people in the firing line."

The battles are over turf and the control of hundreds of small clubs and
shops which line Green Lanes and the surrounding streets in Harringey. Many
are used as the base for drug deals. Mr Coles said: "If you control the
turf, you control the cashflow."

At the heart of the struggle are 200 Turkish and Kurdish gangsters, often
armed with guns smuggled in from the Balkans. The key to the battles is the
power of the Turkish clan, which has heroin networks stretching through
Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Austria as well as Britain.

Originally Kurdish, the clan built its powerbase in North London in the
1990s. The Green Lanes area is the "nerve centre" for distributing tonnes of
heroin throughout Britain.

Turkish gangs supply 70 per cent of Britain's heroin trade and the clan
members account for nearly a third of that amount. Gangs linked to the PKK,
the Kurdish separatist movement, are now struggling with the clan over the
protection rackets and drug deals.

Mr Coles said that some of the clashes were also linked to fights between
gang members. "Some of the gang warfare is about rip-offs, rip-offs of drugs
and a falling out over drug deals," he said.