Çarkın grew up in Erzincan. He came from an underprivileged family that was unable to fund his high school education; he dropped out. The year after the Kurdistan Workers' Party was established, he signed up to the police force. He received training in special warfare from Korkut Eken. He was deployed in Diyarbakır under chief Şahin, who described Çarkın as his best man. He gained a reputation for conducting lightning-fast raids—350 in all—though some have suggested the possibility that some of his victims might have been innocent. He was active in southeast Turkey from 1986 to 1990. Later, Şahin took Çarkın to Istanbul to target Dev-Sol militants. He led a raid on 12 July 1991 in which eleven were killed. Relatives of the victims took the state to the European Court of Human Rights, and won the case. Çarkın's next raid was on 16 April 1992; three were killed. Twenty people including Çarkın were sued; this time he was acquitted. Another was the "Perpa" raid on 13 August 1993 in which Selma Çıtlak, Mehmet Salgın, Sabri Atılmış, Hakan Kasa, and Mehmet Akyürek were killed. Five of the eight participating policemen were initially sentenced to death, but this was reduced to three years and ten months in prison. They were all acquitted by the Supreme Court of Appeals.
Çarkın was involved in the events that led to the scandal. Specifically, he was part of the elite Police Special Operation Teams department that was responsible for assassinating businessmen suspected of financially supporting the PKK. One of these was allegedly the so-called "casino king", Ömer Lütfü Topal, assassinated in July 1996. Çarkın's associates included Ayhan Akça, Oğuz Yorulmaz, Ercan Ersoy, and the notorious Abdullah Çatlı. Three were detained, but released on the orders of the chief of police, Mehmet Ağar, and transferred to become bodyguards for another key figure in the scandal, Sedat Bucak. Bucak was a True Path Party deputy as well as the leader of a 20-30,000-strong armed clan. Significantly, he was the only survivor of the November 1996Susurluk car crash, thanks to his bodyguards. Since the assassinations were extrajudicial, Çarkın was tried again. He was sentenced to four years in jail; he served twenty months. Çarkın denies having taken part in the Topal assassination. He says he has alibis; he was leading a unit of five in Kadıköy at the moment the assassination took place. After the scandal, the Çiller-Erbakan administration was replaced by the Mesut Yılmaz administration. Çarkın alleges that deputies in the Yılmaz administration offered him a passport to enable him to flee, but he refused since he believed he was innocent. Çarkın became disillusioned and spoke out. He alleges that the state, using the clandestine Ergenekon network, colluded with militant groups such as the PKK, Dev-Sol, and Hezbollah, with the goal of profiting from the war.
Smuggling ring
In January 2011, Turkish police announced that after a nine-month investigation they had uncovered a smuggling and bribery ring operating in Istanbul that dealt mostly with smuggling cigarettes. Ayhan Çarkın was alleged to be involved in the scheme, along with others suspected of involvement in the Susurluk scandal.
