ISTANBUL, Oct 14 (AFP) - Turkey's top mafia boss Alaattin Cakici was brought back from Austria Thursday to face a long list of charges including murder and involvement in a bank scandal that led to a government collapse six years ago.
Cakici, 51, sought by Turkey and Interpol since 2002, was arrested in July near the southern Austrian city of Graz in possession of a fake passport.
Last week, a Vienna court ruled to extradite him -- a decision made possible by the abolition of capital punishment in Turkey in 2002.
Cakici is one of Turkey's most wanted criminals.
He was at the center of a 1998 scandal over the privatization of a state bank, which resulted in the toppling of the government of then-prime minister Mesut Yilmaz.
Most recently, his alleged ties with the judiciary and with intelligence officials triggered investigations against the top judge of the appeals court, one of his aides and a member of MIT, the national intelligence service.
A three-man police team brought Cakici back on a flight from Vienna to Istanbul, where he was whisked aboard a Scorpion armored vehicle from the airport to the courthouse amid tight security and placed under arrest after undergoing a medical check.
He faces charges in six separate cases, two of them carrying possible life terms -- one for ordering the 1995 murder of his wife and the other of four other people, including his former right-hand man, in 1996, the Anatolia news agency reported.
He will also stand trial for his role in the failed privatization of the public bank Turkbank in 1998, in which the Yilmaz government allegedly resorted to Cakici's services to scare off unwanted bidders.
Yilmaz himself risks trial before the Supreme Court over the scandal following a renewed parliamentary investigation into the case earlier this year.
Cakici also faces charges for ordering an armed attack in 2000 that injured 15 people at a cafe frequented by members of a rival gang.
He has already spent three years in jail over the incident, but the appeals court has overturned part of the ruling and wants his sentence increased.
Cakici also faces charges of ordering a 1997 attack against a stock broker -- the victim survived -- and of fleeing Turkey with a fake passport.
Cakici escaped in May, reportedly hours before judicial authorities issued an arrest warrant against him and, according to the Turkish media, thanks to the appeals court dragging its feet in sending confirmation of his jail sentence to the relevant authorities.
Cakici was an extreme right-wing militant in Turkey's notorious Grey Wolves group until he turned to full-time crime and became a mob leader in the 1990s. He was allegedly sub-contracted by MIT for secret missions in the 1970s.