At least seven people have been arrested in Turkey, including a former police chief, in the latest operation carried out by Istanbul police and the National Intelligence Organisation (MİT) against suspected spies working for Mossad, Israel’s secret services, Turkish media reported on Tuesday.
Security sources confirmed that one of those arrested, identified as Hamza Turhan Ayberk and currently working as a private investigator, had been a former police chief in the Güngören district of Istanbul and was even a well-known figure for his appearance on television shows in Turkey speaking on security issues. According to the information revealed by the MİT, Ayberk had been leaking information to the Mossad in exchange for money, both about people from the Middle East in Turkey and about Turkish companies with links to countries in that region.
According to these reports, a member of the Mossad using the code name “Victoria” reportedly contacted Ayberk, initially assigning him “easy tasks”; subsequently, and after receiving training in Belgrade in 2019, he was assigned more complex tasks including the recruitment of Turkish civil servants to assist him in espionage activities for the Israeli secret services; to this end, he reportedly received instructions on the use of an encrypted messaging app, as well as cryptocurrency payments to conceal money transfers.
The Turkish secret services claim that Ayberk was also involved in operations to track and even threaten several targets in Turkey identified by Israel’s Mossad, including installing GPS tracking devices in the vehicles of the people he was supposed to spy on. No further information on this operation is available for now, but since the beginning of the year dozens of suspects have been arrested by Turkish security forces in a series of raids aimed at dismantling an spy network set up by the Israeli secret services in Turkey with the aim of tracking and ‘neutralising’ targets residing in Turkey, mainly foreigners, including Palestinians.
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Pablo Gómez is a specialist in Turkey and has been editor-in-chief of Hispanatolia since 2011. He has been analysing current affairs and geopolitics in Turkey and the surrounding region since 2006.
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