Enes Kanter is taking every measure possible to make sure he does not fall into the hands of the Turkish Government whom he said are after his life, so he has asked to be excused by his team from the trip to London for fear of assassination.
Enes Kanter is well known in Turkey and outside his home country to be a huge critic of the Turkish Government and President Recep Tayyib Erdogan, and someone also suspected to have been named in the failed coup to over throw the Turkish government a few weeks back.
Speaking to ESPN on the issue, Enes Kanter said:
“Sadly, I’m not going because of that freaking lunatic, the Turkish president,”
“There’s a chance that I can get killed out there.”
“It’s pretty sad that just all this stuff affects my career in basketball, because I want to be out there helping my team win,” the 26-year-old player added.
“But just because of that one lunatic guy, one maniac or dictator, I can’t even go out there and just do my job. So it’s pretty sad.”
“They got a lot of spies there,” Kanter said when asked if he really believed he could be killed traveling to London. “I can get killed pretty easy.”
An officials of Knicks who tries to play down the fears has blamed the Enes Kanter not traveling with his team on visa issue. But Kanter who is a native of Turkey will not risk is life out there, as the arrest of his father over his comment, is enough sign that he is not safe in Europe.
In 2016, Kanter spoke out against Erdogan following a bombing in Ankara, Turkey’s capital city. Kanter, who has received death threats, supports Fethullah Gulen, a U.S.-based Turkish cleric who has been exiled from Turkey and is a bitter rival of Erdogan’s. The Turkish government has accused Gulen of masterminding a failed military coup in 2016. Gulen has denied the allegation.
According to a report by The New York Times, Erdogan has jailed, fired or suspended tens of thousands of people accused of plotting a failed coup. In December 2017, Turkey’s state-run news agency, Anadolu Agency, reported that prosecutors were seeking more than four years in prison for Kanter on charges of insulting Erdogan in a series of tweets he posted in 2016, the report said.