Danish man tracks down TC father

By Kyriacos Kiliaris
Thomas Knudtsen, a Danish citizen from the small town of Stevns, was reunited with his Turkish Cypriot father whom he had never met before with the help of a TV show called ‘Without a Trace’ (Sporlös).

Knudtsen, 52, through the Danish TV programme, was able not only to reunite with his father, but also found he has approximately 250 Turkish Cypriot relatives!
Searching for his biological father, Knudtsen asked the TV reality programme to help him in his search.

He told reporters that his father was a Turkish Cypriot from a village in the Morphou region.
A ‘Without a Trace’ team first travelled to London, where his mother had met his father Mehmet Huseyin in a restaurant where he used to work at the time. The DR1 crew, however, were not able to find any trace of Huseyin and decided to expand their search to the north of Cyprus.
The Danish reporters went through the civil registry archives in the north, only to come up empty-handed.

They then decided to place an advertisement in Turkish Cypriot newspaper Kibris, calling on anyone who knew of Huseyin’s whereabouts to give them a call.

The idea worked and, on the same day that the ad ran in the paper, a Kibris reporter received a call from a woman claiming to be Knudtsen’s aunt. The woman asked to see Knudtsen to give him information on the whereabouts of his father.

Knudtsen was pleased to hear his father was alive and well, living in Tottenham, in north London. He was also told his father had 10 siblings, and that he had 250 new relatives to meet.
Thereafter, Knudtsen boarded a plane to London where he finally reunited with his 74-year-old father and step-sister.

Mehmet Huseyin told reporters of how he had met Knudtsen’s mother after he had left Cyprus for England, following inter-communal fighting in 1964.

He said he had had a short-lived relationship with Knudtsen’s Danish mother, Bodil Knudtsen, who had been working in the country as a nanny for an English family.

Their affair ended when she decided to return to Denmark, with Huseyin not wishing to follow her.
However, upon her return to Denmark, she had found out she was pregnant. Although she thereafter told Huseyin of the news, he never got to see his son until he was located by the Danish reality show.