Scorer of the fastest World Cup goal had Turkey’s president as a wedding guest but now lives in enforced exile in the USThere is a photograph,noted in Turkey, taken at the wedding of one of the nation’s greatest footballers, and a Uefa Cup winner who played in a World Cup semi-final. In the picture,Hakan Sukur is next to two witnesses, the nation’s president, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan,and the cleric Fethullah Gulen. A wedding is supposed to be one of the highlights in a man’s life but it did not work out like that for Sukur.
The woman he married that day is dead, Sukur’s father has been imprisoned and the player capped 112 times by Turkey finds himself in exile. Should he ever return to his native land he would face charges of insulting the president and rebelling against the government. Life imprisonment would be certain and he could even face the death penalty. He will never see his father again, and all the adulation he once had is lost. Sukur has lost his country.
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Source: guardian.co.uk