Sweden agrees to extradite fraudster wanted in Turkey

Sweden is extraditing a man wanted for credit card fraud to Turkey in the first such legal step known since Ankara demanded the expulsion of dozens of alleged terrorists as the price for agreeing to Stockholm’s bid to become a member of Nato.

Sweden’s centre-left government has agreed to extradite the Turkish citizen, who has been convicted of fraud in Turkey, the justice ministry in Stockholm said.

Sweden’s bid to join the western military alliance, along with neighbour Finland, has been held up by opposition from Turkey, whose president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has demanded that Stockholm extradite 73 people who are accused by Ankara of terrorism. All Nato members including Turkey have to agree to allow other countries to join.

The Turkish man who Sweden has agreed to extradite is a 35-year-old whose name appears on that list, according to Swedish national broadcaster SVT.

The man was convicted in Turkey of bank and credit card fraud in 2013 and 2016, according to the Swedish justice ministry, and sentenced to 14 years in jail.

He argued to Sweden’s supreme court that he was wrongly convicted owing to three reasons: converting to Christianity from Islam, refusing to do military service and because his mother is Kurdish, according to SVT.

Sweden’s justice minister Morgan Johansson said: “This is a normal, routine matter . . . The supreme court has examined the issue, as usual, and concluded that there are no obstacles to extradition.” His ministry refused to say if the man’s name was on the Turkish list but underscored that the case was more than a year old and therefore predated Sweden’s Nato application.

Turkey has been angered by Sweden’s often vocal support for Kurdish groups as well as several Kurdish-born MPs who sit in the Swedish parliament. One, Amineh Kakabaveh, has twice rescued the Social Democrat prime minister Magdalena Andersson from having to resign by giving her vote in return for promises from the centre-left party about defending Kurdish rights.

Sweden, Finland and Turkey signed a trilateral agreement at the Nato summit in Madrid in June under which Ankara appeared to end its opposition to the two Nordic countries joining the military alliance.

Sweden and Finland have had their membership applications ratified by 23 of Nato’s 30 members in record time. The US did so formally this week after president Joe Biden endorsed the decision of the Senate.

But Turkey is still threatening to cause problems, warning Sweden that it wants to see progress on extraditions before its parliament agrees to ratify the Nato application.

Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter said that of a list published in the Turkish media of 33 people wanted for extradition, Sweden had already rejected 19 of them.

Sweden and Finland have argued that they have separate judicial processes for deciding extraditions and that governments cannot intervene in the process. They pledged under the June deal to process Turkey’s pending extradition requests “expeditiously and thoroughly” but the memorandum made no mention of a number of suspects such as Erdoğan’s figure of 73.

The people Turkey has demanded are mostly members of two groups it considers terrorist organisations: the armed Kurdistan Workers’ party, or PKK, and followers of an Islamic preacher blamed for masterminding an abortive military coup in 2016.

A spokesman from the Turkish foreign ministry was not immediately available to comment on the report that one person would be sent back for financial crimes.

Additional reporting by Ayla Jean Yackley in Istanbul