Turkey Police Should Break Drug Dealers' Legs, Minister Says

(Bloomberg) -- The minister heading Turkey's national police force demanded that officers break drug dealers' legs, saying he'd take responsibility when they did, according to a report by the state-run Anadolu Agency.

“A police officer who doesn't break the leg of a drug dealer around a school isn't performing his duty,” Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu said at a conference in Ankara on fighting drug abuse. “Put the blame on me. Whatever the crime is, even if it's jail time for 5 years, 10 years or 20 years, I'll serve it,” he said.

Drug dealers are no different from terrorists and should be treated the same way, Soylu said. He said that the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, an outlawed Kurdish militant group, earns $1.5 billion a year from the drug trade and warned that an 87 percent increase in opium production in Afghanistan last year would lead to an increase in smuggling via Turkey.

“We have to act mercilessly,” Soylu said. “Whatever a security officer does to someone they see selling drugs, the responsibility is on me.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Taylan Bilgic in Istanbul at tbilgic2@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Benjamin Harvey at bharvey11@bloomberg.net.

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