STOCKHOLM: The charges against a Swedish journalist who was arrested on arrival to cover the mass protests rocking Turkey are “absurd“, his newspaper’s editor in chief said Sunday.
Joakim Medin, a correspondent for the newspaper Dagens ETC, was detained when his plane landed in Turkey, the latest journalist jailed trying to cover protests over the arrest of Istanbul mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, the top opponent of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Medin was arrested on charges of membership in an armed terrorist organisation and “insulting the president”, according to Erdogan’s office.
“The accusations are absurd,“ Dagens ETC editor in chief Andreas Gustavsson told AFP in a written message.
“He is a journalist, nothing else. And practicing journalism should not be a crime.”
Medin was detained Thursday and sent to prison the next day.
“Great efforts are being made to ensure that he is released and can return home to his family, and to his colleagues at Dagens ETC,“ Gustavsson said.
The Turkish authorities notably accuse him of taking part in a January rally in Stockholm by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has led a decades-long insurgency against the Turkish state.
Medin’s jailing came just hours after the authorities released the last of 11 journalists arrested in dawn raids on Monday for covering the protests, among them AFP photographer Yasin Akgul.
Turkish authorities have also deported BBC journalist Mark Lowen, who had been covering the protests, after holding him for 17 hours on Wednesday, saying he posed “a threat to public order”, the broadcaster said.
