A man has been jailed for helping a drug dealer involved in the kidnap, torture and killing of a popular London radio DJ.
Mehmet Koray Alpergin, 43, and his girlfriend Gozde Dalbudak, 36, were abducted as they returned home from an Italian restaurant in Mayfair in October 2022.
Mr Alpergin was attacked and his body dumped in an Essex woodland, while Ms Dalbudak spent two days locked in a toilet before being freed by her captors.
Zubair Iqbal, 33, of Ilford in east London, was an associate of Tejean Kennedy, who in 2024 was found guilty of the kidnap and false imprisonment of the couple and of Mr Alpergin's manslaughter.
Iqbal was cleared of conspiracy to kidnap but convicted of assisting an offender following a separate trial earlier this year, and was sentenced to 10 months' imprisonment on Friday.
An Old Bailey judge heard on Friday that Iqbal assisted Kennedy for a period of about seven hours on the night Mr Alpergin was killed, providing him with a safe house to leave his clothing and mobile phone in, and laundering monies for him.
Judge Sarah Whitehouse KC, sentencing, told the defendant that although she accepted he did not know the extent of "the gravity and the horrors of what was planned" for Mr Alpergin and Ms Dalbudak, he must have been aware that a serious criminal enterprise was afoot at the time.
"This was a very sophisticated plan to kidnap and torture Mr Alpergin," Judge Whitehouse said.
"You are not a naive man and you are intelligent.
"You must have been aware of what was going on because Kennedy was in a habit of using other people to further his own criminality.
"You must have been aware at that stage, and early, that this is what was being planned: your house was to be used and you must have been aware that this was important and not to be interfered with."
"Assisting an offender is a very, very grave offence," she added.
"The task of identifying Kennedy was made significantly harder as a result of your assistance.
"Such offence strikes at the very heart of the criminal justice system."
The court heard that Iqbal and his brother used to run a chicken shop which Kennedy used for the packaging of drugs he sold.
Kennedy, who has ties to the Tottenham Turks organised crime gang, would also use Iqbal's bank account to launder monies, presumably for payments to criminal third parties, the court was told.
On October 13 2022, the night Mr Alpergin and Ms Dalbudak were abducted, there was a "high level of telephone communications" between Iqbal and Kennedy, Judge Whitehouse said.
She told the court that Kennedy used Iqbal's house prior to the kidnapping to change his clothing and leave his personal mobile phone on charge and connected to the internet so as to make it look as though he had been at the defendant's house all night.
She told Iqbal that Mr Alpergin's family "have suffered terribly knowing what Mr Alpergin's last hours were like".
Three men - Dylan Weatherley, Kyrie Mitchell-Peart, and Isay Stoyanov - were jailed last year for their part in the kidnap and killing of Mr Alpergin.
Weatherley, 20, from Tottenham, north London, was sentenced to five years for the manslaughter of Mr Alpergin and his kidnap and false imprisonment.
The sentence was added to another he was already serving for a separate conspiracy to murder, for which he received life with a minimum term of 16 years.
Mitchell-Peart, 33, from Barnet, who had pleaded guilty to the kidnap and false imprisonment of Mr Alpergin and his girlfriend, was sentenced to six years and four months.
Bulgarian painter and decorator Stoyanov, 44, from Seven Sisters in north London, was found guilty of perverting the course of justice and jailed for 18 months.
The court had previously heard that Mr Alpergin received 94 separate injuries to his body during the course of the attack.He suffered a blow to the head, was strangled with a ligature, hit with a baseball bat breaking 14 ribs, scalded with boiling water, stabbed on the feet and subjected to horrific internal wounds.
Mr Alpergin, who was originally from northern Cyprus, owned a Turkish-language radio station in London - Bizim FM - and was a well-known and popular figure within the Turkish community in the UK.In a separate 2023 trial, four more men were convicted for their roles.
