Mendi Safadi is always seen mixing scandalous people, let it be Turkish Islamist orator and sex cult boss Harun Yahya or Shipan Kumer Basu, cash handler of West Bengal’s infamous SSC scandal. According sources, Mendi Safadi went to Turkey to meet Turkish radical Muslim speaker, Adnan Oktar alias Harun Yahya and held series of “meetings”, where in many occasions, Safadi was seen surrounded by Oktar’s band of young women. It is a grand mystery as to what prompted Mendi Safadi in meeting Adnan Oktar, although these meetings were claimed to had been claimed as “efforts of interfaith understanding”.
Media reports said, Adnan Oktar alias Harun Yahya was running a sex cult, for which he has been jailed for a term of over 8,000 years. A Turkish court sentenced Oktar aka Harun Yahya, who surrounded himself with scantily clad women he called “kittens” to more eight thousand years in prison for hundreds of sex crimes.
Adnan Oktar preached creationism and conservative values while women in revealing outfits – many of who appeared to have had plastic surgery – danced around him to upbeat music in the TV studio. The bearded 64-year-old was detained in 2018 along with more than 200 other suspects as part of a crackdown on his group by the financial crimes unit of the Istanbul police.
Harun Yahya was sentenced to 1,075 years for crimes including sexual assault, sexual abuse of minors, fraud and attempted political and military espionage.
During the trial, which was followed closely by Turkish media for months, the court heard lurid and harrowing details of sex crimes.
Harun Yahya told the presiding judge in December that he had close to 1,000 girlfriends. “There is an overflowing of love in my heart for women. Love is a human quality. It is a quality of a Muslim,” he said in another hearing in October.
He added on a separate occasion: “I am extraordinarily potent”.
Oktar aka Harun Yahya first came to public attention in the 1990s when he was the leader of a sect that was caught up in multiple sex scandals. His online A9 television channel began broadcasting in 2011.
One of the women at his trial, identified only as CC, told the court that Oktar had repeatedly sexually abused her and other women. Some of the women he had raped were forced to take contraceptive pills, CC told the court, adding that she herself had joined when she was 17 years old.
Asked about 69,000 contraception pills found in his home by the police, Harun Yahya said they were used to treat skin disorders and menstrual irregularities.
With the court verdict, it marks the end of a long and bizarre career for the preacher, television host, author and filmmaker.
Beginning his career in the 80s as a firebrand orator, railing against Jews, Freemasons and Charles Darwin, he later became (in)famous for his shows on Turkish TV, in which he would discuss Islamic principles while scantily clad women with bleached blonde hair danced around him to popular music. These women Oktar referred to as his “kittens”.
