By Mark Baber
February 25 – The Turkish national team’s record goal scorer, former Inter Milan and Galatasaray striker Hakan Sukur, has been indicted for insulting the increasingly dictatorial Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Twitter, an offence for which he faces up to four years in a Turkish jail.
The Bakirkoy 28th Criminal Court of First Instance accepted the indictment against Sukur on Wednesday with Hakan Suker being among a string of journalists, bloggers and tweeters who stand to lose their liberty for allegedly insulting Erdogan and his son in posts he wrote on Twitter.
Sukur denies targeting Erdogan, but the prosecution allege that even though the president isn’t mentioned “the tweets were clearly related to the Turkish president”, according to the Dogan news agency, cited by AFP.
Ironically, Suker went into political life after his football career ended, serving as an MP in Erdogan’s party the AKP. In December 2013 he resigned from the AKP, becoming an Independent, after being disillusioned with the level of corruption in Turkey’s political elite.
Hakan Sukur’s indictment comes shortly after Deniz Naki, a forward with the Amedspor club in the main Kurdish city of Diyarbakir, was barred from playing 12 matches and ordered to pay a fine of 19,500 Turkish lira (around €6,200) by the Turkish Football Federation for making statements considered “ideological propaganda” on the conflict in Turkish Kurdistan, including saying: “We have no other choice but to call for peace.”
It is unknown whether Hassan Sukur is in Turkey as he has been opening a sports academy in the USA, but his indictment emphasises that football and even the highest profile and most revered sportspeople cannot escape entanglement in Turkey’s current political climate.
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