Mehmet is a Turkish Cypriot and the older brother of the original owner of the Bridge street café, Ali Osman (Nejdet Salih).

After he gets into more trouble with his customers for overcharging on fares and then trying to seduce Hannah Carpenter (Sally Sagoe) — the wife of his employee — the residents of Albert Square decide to confront him.

Den Watts (Leslie Grantham), Pete Beale (Peter Dean) and Tony Carpenter (Oscar James) find him and give him a severe beating which involves having his arms pinned behind his back whilst taking a number of blows to the stomach.

Mehmet proceeds to make things infinitely worse for himself soon after, when he stakes his house and business on a bet, loses and swiftly disappears leaving his wife, Guizin Osman (Ishia Bennison), to face up to the consequences.

A then homeless Guzin arrives at Ali and his wife Sue's (Sandy Ratcliff) doorstep with the news that Mehmet had beaten her, and she isn't ever returning to him.

Ali and Sue are forced to take Guizin and her three children, Murat, Rayif and Emine (Pelin Ahmet) into their one bedroom apartment.

Later in the year Mehmet and Ali run up huge gambling debts to Joanne Francis (Pamela Salem), manageress of Strokes wine bar, and who is also a member of the criminal underworld known as The Firm.

Ali divulges Sue and Mehmet's fabricated affair to Guzin, who is unable to forgive her husband's latest infidelity with her sister-in-law.

Mehmet, the brother of original character Ali Osman (Nejdet Salih), was part of a well-intentioned attempt to represent the proportion of Turkish Cypriots who had immigrated to England and settled in the East End of London.

Holland and Smith knew that for the soap to succeed there needed to be a varied group of characters, so that several different sections of the audience had someone to identify with.

Even though the ethnic minority groups were deemed the hardest to research, Holland and Smith called upon their social contacts to relay information about their own origins and lifestyles, which they say allowed them to portray Walford's most recent immigrants more realistically.

Holland believed Bilginer possessed the right "look" and that Salih was not tall or tough-looking enough, "he didn't have the sort of physical presence that put you on your guard.

His quip impressed Holland and Smith; they have since commented that Salih almost got the part on the strength of that line alone, as the felt it typified the character perfectly.

A serial gambler, Mehmet was shown to steer Ali into various money-losing ploys, and had a combustible marriage to Guizin, who put up with his philandering, as in the Turkish community, that's "what a wife was expected to do".

[3] Described as "the Terrible Turk", Haluk Bilginer was one of the more popular male cast members on EastEnders during the 1980s, and he reportedly received sackfuls of fan mail, "despite playing a villain and a womanising snake".