Swedish journalist freed from Turkey hails freedom
A Swedish journalist jailed in Turkey for nearly two months on a charge of "insulting" President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday hailed his freedom after being released and returning home.
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"I have been thinking about what I should say at this moment and it is: 'Long live freedom, the freedom of the press, the freedom of expression, and the freedom of movement'," Joakim Medin told a press conference in Stockholm.
Medin, a 40-year-old reporter working for the Dagens ETC daily, was released from the high-security Silivri prison and flew back to Sweden on Friday.
The journalist had been arrested on March 27 when he arrived in Istanbul to cover the biggest street demonstrations Turkey had seen in over a decade.
The protests were sparked when Erdogan's chief political rival, Istanbul mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, was arrested a week earlier on corruption charges he strongly denied.
Last month, Medin was convicted and given an 11-month suspended sentence, but remained behind bars pending a further trial on a charge of belonging to a terror organisation. He also denies that allegation.
Medin appeared in the Stockholm press conference alongside his wife, Sofie Axelsson, also a journalist.
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He said he thought that Axelsson's pregnancy with their first child, as well as the political context in Turkey might have played a role in him being released.
"It is obviously no coincidence, probably, that I was released... the same day as many Kurdish prisoners were also released in Turkey. And the same day as our foreign minister met the Turkish foreign minister at the NATO meeting in Antalya," he said.
Earlier Saturday, the Swedish foreign minister, Maria Malmer Sternergard, had stressed that the government had not made any compromises to Turkey to secure Medin's release.
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