The father of the NBA player Enes Kanter, an outspoken critic of the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has been acquitted of terrorism charges, the basketball star has said.
Charges against Dr Mehmet Kanter, a former genetics professor at Istanbul University, were dropped on Thursday by a court in north-western Tekirdağ province, local media said on Friday. There was no immediate statement from the court on why he had been cleared.
“Wow! I could cry … Today I found out that 7 years after arresting my dad, taking him through a Kangaroo court and accusing him of being a criminal just because he is my dad, my dad has been released,” his son tweeted.
Dr Kanter began a 15-year prison sentence in 2018 after being found guilty of links to the Pennsylvania-based cleric Fethullah Gülen, whom Turkey blames for a failed 2016 coup. Gülen and members of his religious movement – Erdoğan’s former allies – have been designated as terrorists in Turkey since the putsch attempt, charges that Gülen has denied.
The 28-year-old player for the Boston Celtics grew close to the cleric after moving to the US a decade ago, and remains one of his rare full-throated supporters.
Kanter has used his huge platform at the NBA to criticise Turkey’s increasingly authoritarian direction since 2013, when Erdoğan’s government was hit by both a huge corruption scandal and popular protests sparked by the redevelopment of Istanbul’s Gezi park. He frequently calls the Turkish leader a lunatic and dictator on social media, and once compared him to Hitler.
Kanter maintains that his family was forced to publicly disown him in a Turkish newspaper and that his father has been aggressively targeted by the Turkish authorities in an attempt to silence him. After the family home was raided and electronics seized as evidence in 2016, the athlete ceased communication with his parents and siblings for fear of retribution.
The younger Kanter, a centre for the Boston Celtics, was indicted on terrorism charges in 2018 and detained for several hours at an airport in Romania in 2017 after Turkey cancelled his passport.
He is awaiting US citizenship but has since been unable to travel abroad, saying in interviews he fears his life is in danger from the Turkish state. Officials in Ankara have dismissed his claims as baseless.
“They no longer could keep [my father] from his freedom because of the spotlight that we all put on this case! However! He is just one person, there are still tens of thousands of people wrongfully in jail in Turkey. I will not forget you, we will not forget you!” Kanter tweeted.
Since the coup attempt, about 50,000 Gülen followers and other critics have been arrested and approximately 111,000 fired from civil service jobs in successive purges aimed at neutralising threats to Erdoğan’s power.
Turkey has been experiencing “a deepening human rights crisis over the past four years, with a dramatic erosion of its rule of law and democracy framework”, a recent Human Rights Watch report said.