In a taxi home from Arlanda, late at night on Saturday, Joakim Medin sets up for a first interview with his employer Dagens ETC.
The pressure on my chest disappeared as soon as we took off and started heading home. It has happened incredibly fast, it came from nowhere yesterday afternoon, he says to the newspaper.
That he is now released and gets to participate when his heavily pregnant wife Sofie Axelsson is about to give birth to their first child is an indescribable happiness, he tells – at the same time as he feels anger over the lost weeks of uncertainty and "the completely absurd accusations".
The time in prison, where he was locked up in a cell of 18 square meters, he describes as exhausting.
There is nothing. You have to buy everything. If you want to eat with utensils from a plate, be able to clean your cell – you have to buy everything. And there is no information, no translations on how to request things from the management. I have received help from neighbors in other isolation cells who shouted how I should do and spell when I wrote notes to request things.
Despite this, he was treated relatively well and got plenty of food, Medin tells, and adds that it has made him even more motivated to monitor authoritarian powers journalistically.
Journalist Joakim Medin traveled on assignment for the newspaper Dagens ETC to Istanbul on March 27 to report on the extensive protests in the country, since Istanbul's mayor Ekrem Imamoglu was arrested.
Medin, who has visited Turkey as a journalist several times, was arrested directly at the airport.
After that, he was moved to the high-security prison Marmara in Silivri outside Istanbul, where many of Turkey's political prisoners sit or have sat. Medin sat on the same ward as the imprisoned mayor Imamoglu.
On April 23, he was charged with participating in a terrorist organization, spreading terrorist propaganda, and insulting the president.
In a first trial in Ankara regarding the charge of insulting Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, he was sentenced to a conditional sentence for insulting.
He was released on May 16 and landed in Sweden shortly after midnight on May 17. But even though Medin has been released and has been allowed to leave the country, the charges of terrorist crimes remain and will be tried in Turkey in Medin's absence, according to Dagens ETC.
