“I can only repeat that he is a journalist who has done journalism,” Dagens ETC Editor-in-chief Andreas Gustavsson said. “Joakim is not a criminal, definitely not some kind of terrorist.”
Gustavsson argued that Turkey was “trying to claim that all the journalistic work that Joakim Medin has produced about Turkey is terrorism.”
“This is of course an absurd accusation,” he said.
Swedish Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard said earlier this month that she had raised Medin’s case with her Turkish counterpart, and called for him to be allowed to “come home.”
Relations between Sweden and Turkey have previously been rocky, with Ankara initially refusing to ratify Stockholm’s bid to join NATO over, among other things, the presence of Kurdish groups in the Nordic country.
Turkey has been criticized by human rights observers and the European Union for increasingly repressive practices, including imprisoning journalists and stifling political dissent.