An unscrupulous drugs baron who kidnapped, tortured and murdered his uncle and then left his body in the vault of a derelict bank has been jailed for life.
The crimes took place in West Yorkshire - which was known up until 1974 as the West Riding, dubbed the Red Riding in David Peace’s superb quartet of books, which were set during the reign of the Yorkshire Ripper.
In today’s Substack we explore modern-day West Yorkshire and the evil crimes of Tahir Syed (pictured).
On 29 December 2019 the body of Asghar Badshah, 39, a bus driver from Bradford, was found hidden in the vault of an abandoned Yorkshire Bank branch in nearby Batley.
In March 2020, in a BBC documentary it was claimed Badshah was killed by a drugs gang because he had stolen some money.
In the excellent documentary, Hometown, journalist Mobeen Azhar returned to Huddersfield - where he grew up - to investigate the death of Mohammed Yassar Yaqub, a drug dealer who was gunned down by the police on the M62 motorway in January 2017.
But Azhar’s investigations unearthed a bigger story - gangs selling heroin in towns like Huddersfield, Bradford and Leeds who were all too happy to kill to protect their turf or punish those who had crossed them.
In May 2021 four men - Qaisar Shah, Sabbah Shamuradi, Sobia Syed, and Liam Buckley - were charged in connection with the death of Mr Badshah.
I will return to them later, but they were all working for Tahir Syed, 42, who was jailed for life with a minimum tariff of 34 years on June 13, 2025.
The trial at Leeds Crown Court heard Syed’s gang had imported five tonnes of cocaine and heroin - worth £125 million - between 2016 and 2021.
There were 30 shipments of up to 200 kilos each, brought over from the Netherlands, hidden inside frozen halal chicken carcasses.
There was no legitimate demand for the chicken and it would simply be disposed of once it had been thawed out and the drugs removed.
The National Crime Agency had intelligence on Syed’s gang and had his underlings under surveillance by the summer of 2019.
On 17 September 2019 Syed’s right-hand man Yusuf Kara, 36, was arrested as he moved heavy bags in Bradford.
Another associated Imran Khan Ashraf, 36, from Bradford, was stopped and arrested in Bolton, and £130,000 in a vacuum-packed bag was found in his car along with four phones.
NCA officers searched Ashraf’s homee and found 51 kilos of heroin.
Syed knew Kara's arrest, and particularly information on those four phones, would implicate him so he quickly liquidated his assets - swapping two luxury cars for two watches worth a total of £103,000 - and left the UK.
Detectives did indeed find damning evidence on Kara's phone - invoices for drug shipments, and photographs (pictured) of Syed driving a forklift truck used to offload deliveries of narcotics.
But Syed risked arrest to return to the UK two months later - travelling on a fake North Macedonian passport - because he was convinced his uncle, Asghar Badshah, had stolen money from him.
With the police unaware of his presence in West Yorkshire, Syed arranged for his uncle to undertake a lie detector test, or polygraph examination, in an attempt to determine if he was telling the truth about not being responsible for the missing money.
After being told Badshah had failed the lie detector test, Syed arranged for him to be kidnapped and tortured by Qaisar Shah, 40, and three men based in the south of England.
On the night of 29 November 2019 Badshah was abducted and taken to a disused bank vault in Batley.
Once there he was tortured through the night as Syed attempted to find out information about the missing money.
There are a lot of similarities with the fate of Koray Alpergin, who was tortured to death in a disused bar opposite Tottenham Hotspur football stadium in October 2022 by a gang working for the notorious Tottenham Turks.
I wrote a Substack about the Alpergin case last year.
The reasons for his death are not clear but it is believed to have revolved around some missing drugs or money.
In the case of Asghar Badshah, a post-mortem found he had been struck 48 times with a blunt object on his head, neck, torso, and all four limbs, before he finally died.
It is not clear if he ever gave up the location of the money, or if he had actually taken it in the first place.
Badshah was reported missing by his family and a month later - on 29 December 2019 – his body was found wrapped in a cloth and hidden on a shelving unit inside the vault. A false wall had also been built on the staircase leading down to the vault in a bid to prevent the body being discovered.
Syed slipped out of the UK again on 5 December 2019, and travelled to Albania, Kosovo, and then onto Turkey using his fake passport.
He ran his Yorkshire drugs empire, from Turkey, and was bringing in huge consignments of Class A drugs.
One shipment, 155 kilos of cocaine, was seized in Rotterdam in August 2020.
Syed had been using the encrypted phone network EncroChat and was taken down when French law enforcement hacked into it in the spring of 2020 and began reading messages on there, which they later shared with agencies around Europe.
The National Crime Agency managed to attribute an EncroChat phone to Syed and worked out how he had been getting drugs into the country.
Syed was finally arrested in Turkey on 11 November 2021, and after losing a battle against extradition, was brought back to the UK and put on trial, finally being convicted in 2025.
Nigel Coles, the senior investigating officer, said: "We have successfully prosecuted and gained significant custodial sentences against individuals at every level of this crime group, dismantling Syed's large-scale international operation from top to bottom, and justice has now been served to one of Britain's biggest crime bosses.”
Cole said the NCA hoped Syed's conviction “provides some sense of justice to the family of Asghar Badshah.”
Detective Chief Superintendent Heather Whoriskey, from West Yorkshire Police, said of the money Badshah supposedly owed Syed: “This perceived debt was about more than just money, it was about Syed's reputation and role as an international drug trafficker.
So what of Syed’s underlings?
Qaisar Shah, 40, from Bradford, pleaded guilty to manslaughter, conspiracy to kidnap and conspiracy to possess criminal property and was jailed for 18 years.
Sabbah Shahmuradi, 39, from Woking in Surrey, and Liam Buckley, 38, from Sunningdale, Berkshire, were both convicted of conspiracy to kidnap Mr Badshah and were both jailed for 7 years and 2 months.
Wajid Hussain, 43 from Rochdale, was also convicted of conspiracy to kidnap and was jailed for 4 years and 2 months.
Sobia Syed, 41, from Bradford, admitted conspiracy to possess criminal property but she was given a suspended sentence.
As for that Huddersfield drug dealer who was shot dead by the police in 2017, an inquest in November 2022 heard that at the time of the shooting Yaqub was suspected of plotting to kidnap a rival, Kilal Sidat.
This article, in the Bradford Telegraph & Argus, states that Yaqub met a notorious Bradford drug dealer called Mohammed Nisar Khan - known as Meggy - on 2 January 2017 and had apparently been given the green light by him to kidnap and assault Sidat.
Meggy Khan, 41, was jailed for life - with a minimum term of 26 years - in May 2019 for the murder of Amriz Iqbal, 40, who was deliberately run over with a car.
The Recorder of Bradford, Judge Jonathan Durham Hall, said Meggy (pictured below), "clearly commanded obedience and loyalty from others and his actions demonstrated that he was dangerous and considered himself untouchable."
Back to that inquest into the M62 police shooting.
The inquest jury - who were not allowed by the coroner to find a ruling of unlawful killing - ruled V39, the police officer who shot Mohammed Yassar Yaqub acted lawfully and "honestly believed... his life was in danger and he used reasonable force discharging his firearm".
The dead man’s father, Mohammed Yaqub, was quoted in this BBC article saying: "We are shocked and do not understand the verdict that this was lawful killing. We believe Yassar was unlawfully killed by V39. He was killed for no good reason. My family and I were cruelly robbed of Yassar. The chance to say our last words was missed.”