A TURKISH court dropped charges yesterday against German midfielder Deniz Naki, who plays in the country, of spreading terrorist propaganda.

Naki was charged after dedicating his winning goal for Diyarbakir’s second-division Amedspor against Buraspor in January, to enter the Turkish Cup, to Kurds killed in a bloody government crackdown.

A prosecutor in the mostly Kurdish Diyarbakir in Turkey’s south-east accused him of aiding the Kurdistan Workers Party guerilla group with his Facebook celebration.

Naki was also slapped with a 12-month ban by Turkey’s football association, on grounds of “ideological propaganda.”

But yesterday a judge in Diyarbakir closed the case, leading Naki to say he was “happy and relieved.”

“The way things have developed in Turkey, I could not expect to be acquitted of the charges,” Naki told German magazine Spiegel. He had previously expected to be jailed for up to five years.

Politicians from Germany’s Left Party attended the trial as observers, along with a member of German embassy staff.

The case had attracted attention in Germany. Naki was an under-21 player for the German national side and played at Hamburg’s famous St Pauli and Paderborn before moving to Turkey in 2013.

Naki, whose parents are Kurdish, left his first Turkish club Genclerbirligi in 2014 after he was attacked in the street by three men bellowing racist slurs and shouting at him for standing up in support of the residents of Kobane, a Syrian-Kurdish town that fended off a murderous assault by the Islamic State (Isis) death cult.