Sweden urges Turkey to release journalist

STOCKHOLM: Sweden's foreign minister met with her Turkish counterpart on Thursday to demand the release of a Swedish journalist convicted in Turkey of insulting the country's president, the Swedish foreign ministry said.

The meeting was held on the sidelines of an informal meeting of EU foreign affairs ministers in Warsaw, the ministry told AFP.

"I met with the Turkish foreign minister (Hakan Fidan), we talked about (journalist) Joakim Medin and I clearly said that I wanted him to return home soon," Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard told the Expressen daily.

Medin, who works for Swedish newspaper Dagens ETC, was detained at Istanbul airport on March 27 when he flew in to cover the mass protests gripping Turkey.

A Turkish court last month handed the 40-year-old an 11-month suspended sentence on charges of insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Prosecutors say Medin attended a protest in Stockholm in January 2023 where protesters strung up an effigy of Erdogan, though Medin argued that he was not even in Sweden at the time of the rally.

The judge ordered that Medin be released, but he remains behind bars awaiting trial on a second charge of belonging to a terrorist group.

Ankara accuses Medin of being a member of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), a claim he has denied.

The PKK has led a decades-long insurgency against the Turkish state, and is blacklisted by Turkey and its Western allies as a terrorist organisation.