Twenty-three-year-old Hasan Mamali and twenty-six-year-old Sami Mustafa were Turkish Cypriots, living in Islington, London, England.
On May 27th, 2001, the two men were sitting in the back seat of a BMW convertible parked in Islington; two other individuals were in the front seats. Quite suddenly, gunfire erupted. Sami Mustafa attempted to flee from the car, but was hit in the head, chest, and back as he ran. Hasan was shot in the head and apparently died immediately.
After the shooting, the driver of the BMW made a U-turn and sped off. The vehicle was found shortly afterward, both doors left open, and Hasan Mamali’s body in the back. The two men in the front of the BMW have never been identified.
The crime was believed to be linked to a series of murders involving the Turkish drug trade, with authorities speculating that Sam and Hasan had either been waiting to buy drugs when they were shot, or had crossed a local drug dealer and were assassinated. It was also theorized that the two men in the BMW had driven the victims to that spot to set them up.
Between 1997 and 2002, at least twenty-five murders were linked to a turf war among Turkish heroin gangs, and very few of the killings, including those of Hasan Mamali and Sami Mustafa, were ever solved
Crime Immemorial 