A 43-year-old Turkish man has died of heart attack while on a charity trip for Turkish asylum claimants in Greece. Hasan Degirmenci suffered a heart attack at the house of a Turkish [refugee] family in Athens and was subsequently taken to a nearby hospital where he later died.
Τhis situation (Persecutions by the Turkish government) made us leave our homeland. Why would people throw their children in to the fire, throw their children into the water? I want people to think of the reason behind, why all this is happening.
Rebecca Harms, a member of the European Parliament and co-president of the Euronest Parliamentary Assembly visited Mustafa Emre Çabuk, a Turkish school administrator who was arrested by Georgian authorities last year at the request of the Turkish government, on Thursday according to her post on her Twitter account.
They were happy when Greek police caught them. “They treated us very well,” Hakan says. “Zehra told us she felt safer spending [several nights] in jail than [she did] in Turkey. She said: ‘The Greek police are keeping us safe from the Turks.'”
Turkish government has been hunting its opponents abroad, particularly the supporters of the Gulen movement since before and after the failed putsch on July 15, 2016, the article said adding that government’s alleged enemies were targeted at least in 46 countries.
Three generations of a Turkish family were stripped of their livelihoods, life savings, friends and culture in a sweeping purge by the authoritarian regime of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. They languish as political refugees in a cramped apartment along a busy commercial stretch of Delaware Avenue.
Now, at least 1,000 Turkish citizens are seeking refuge in Greece, according to the refugee support nonprofit SolidarityNOW. It’s hard to pin down an exact number because not many have applied for asylum, says Antonis Spathis, a human rights lawyer in Thessaloniki. The Greek Asylum Service told NPR that 186 Turkish citizens applied for asylum in 2016 and noted there has been a “significant” increase in 2017.
Since the attempted coup of July 15, 2016 the Government of Turkey has engaged in illegal extraterritorial and extrajudicial actions been taking strict measures to silence dissidents in other countries from various ideologies recently. Participants of Gulen Movement -known also as Hizmet Movement- have been the main target of this global witch-hunt and abductions.