The Ankara chief public prosecutor’s office has arrested Kaj Joakim Medin, a Swedish national who came to Istanbul to report on the protests against the jailing of Istanbul mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, the prosecutor’s office said on March 28.

Medin works for the Dagens ETC daily in Sweden. He was missing for two days before his wherabouts became known.

The journalist is in jail pending trial for membership in a terrorist organisation, while he is also charged with insulting Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

“The labelling of political opponents as terrorists is a tendency the Erdogan government acquired after the failed military coup of 2016, when a faction of the Turkish armed forces tried to take over,” Orhan Pamuk, a Turkish novelist who won the Nobel prize in 2006, wrote in an op-ed for The Guardian on March 28.

Medin was detained in Istanbul since he is among "suspects" who were identified for organising or promoting, or as linked to, a protest that took place against Erdogan held in Stockholm in January 2023.

The Swedish national was interrogated by prosecutors in Ankara via a video link.

The prosecutor’s office has also accused Medin of reporting from conflict zones in Syria, Iraq and Turkey between 2014 and 2017.

Sweden’s foreign minister Maria Malmer Stenergard told her country’s public broadcaster SVT that she has asked Turkey’s ambassador to Stockholm to help Medin access Swedish consular services.

Since the March 19 arrest of Imamoglu, the Erdogan regime has launched a new push to detain journalists. Dozens of journalists have been detained and later on released.

On March 27, Turkish authorities deported Mark Lowen, the Turkey correspondent of the UK’s public broadcaster BBC, over his reporting of the Imamoglu protests.

Yasin Akgul, a Turkish national working as a photojournalist for Agence France-Presse (AFP), was detained on March 24 and released on March 27.

The regime tends to treat the Swedish government as something of a whipping boy. During Sweden’s Nato application phase that took place over a long stretch of time following the February 2022 outbreak of the full-scale war in Ukraine, Erdogan delivered a range of heavy insults aimed at the country, while out of pragmatism the Swedish government stuck to a measured response.