The internationally known hacker group Anonymous announced that it had hacked the official website of the Swedish government in protest against the decision to extradite a Kurdish politician to Turkey.
Sweden on Friday deported Mahmut Tat, who had sought asylum in Sweden in 2015 after being sentenced to six years and 10 months imprisonment in Turkey for alleged links to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
Turkey has been putting pressure on both Sweden and Finland since midsummer, demanding that they extradite people whom Ankara claims are linked to terrorist groups, using its veto power over the two Nordic countries’ bids to join NATO as a bargaining chip.
Tat’s deportation came after Sweden’s new Prime Minister, Ulf Kristersson, who recently visited Ankara, promised to live up to obligations it made to Turkey, which include extraditing dissidents, in exchange for the approval of his country’s NATO membership.
Ankara sees Tat’s deportation as a “good start from Sweden that shows their sincerity and goodwill,” according to the Turkish Justice Minister Bekir Bozdağ, and other extradition decisions are likely to follow.
A member of Anonymous said that if the Swedish government continued to extradite political prisoners, they would continue their protest actions.
Does anyone have any comments on this in Sweden?
sweden delivers political prisoners https://t.co/9A6UPeFrqE— Anonymous 🕸 (@Parrattarna) December 5, 2022
Another member of the decentralised hactivist collective said that Sweden was extraditing innocent political asylum seekers to Turkey, and stressed that the Western politicians are perfectly capable of tuning out human rights criticism when they want to
The hackers demanded that the Swedish government stop the extraditions.
#Sweden has extradited the Kurdish asylum seeker Mahmut Tat to Turkey amid #NATO bid.
Shame on Sweden.
— Anonymous (@Anonymousnn3) December 4, 2022
Tat, who was an active member of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) in Turkey, was denied asylum by the Swedish Migration Agency and Intelligence Service in 2020.
The Kurdish asylum seeker, who has now been jailed in Metris prion in İstanbul, is a cancer patient and cannot currently access his medication, according to Alican Önlü, a deputy of the HDP from Tunceli (Dêrsim) city.
