Ahmet Dönmez, a Turkish journalist living in exile in Sweden, said in an interview with the Journalisten news website that he left the country for the United States some two years after surviving a brutal attack in Stockholm.
Dönmez had narrowly escaped death after being severely beaten in a suburb of Stockholm in March 2022. The attack occurred shortly after he picked up his 6-year-old daughter from school.
“In the heart of Stockholm, where I had felt safe for many years, I almost lost my life,” Dönmez said. “When I was discharged from the hospital, I no longer felt safe in Sweden. My life was turned upside down.”
Despite the severity of his injuries, Dönmez survived, attributing his recovery to a miracle, but he required extensive hospital treatment for three weeks.
Before the attack, Dönmez had tweeted that he was receiving death threats from crime boss İhsan Hızarcı after saying in a YouTube video that Turkey’s then-interior minister Süleyman Soylu had provided protection to mob boss Ayhan Bora Kaplan.
Releasing a photo of the threats he received as WhatsApp messages, Dönmez said in a tweet on February 19, “Ankara mafia boss İhsan Hızarcı, who was mentioned in my last video, sent me this threatening message: ‘Don’t feel safe because you’re in Sweden, I’ll have your head cut off within 24 hours’.”
Dönmez described his disappointment over the Swedish police’s handling of the case, saying he had contacted the police two weeks before the attack but that no action was taken. He said the police didn’t attempt to identify the perpetrators, who remain at large, and eventually closed the investigation.
He noted that his colleague, Abdullah Bozkurt, was also attacked in Stockholm, and in his case, too, the attackers remain free.
“Eventually, I realized there were no guarantees I wouldn’t be targeted again in Sweden. I no longer felt safe, which is why I left Sweden, a country I deeply love,” he said.
Dönmez moved to Sweden following a failed military coup in Turkey in the summer of 2016, after working for two decades at the Zaman newspaper, which was seized and shut down by the Turkish government in 2016 over links to the faith-based Gülen movement.
The Gülen movement, inspired by Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, is labeled as the mastermind of the failed 2016 coup and has also been called a “terrorist organization” by the Turkish government since the corruption investigations of 2013, which implicated then-prime minister Erdoğan, his family members and his inner circle.
Dismissing the investigations as a Gülenist coup and conspiracy against his government, Erdoğan designated the movement as a terrorist organization and began to target its members. He intensified the crackdown on the movement following the coup attempt in 2016 that he accused Gülen of masterminding. Gülen and the movement strongly deny involvement in the coup attempt or any terrorist activity.
The assault on Dönmez was reportedly ordered by a former Turkish minister, according to Turkish-German investigative journalist Erk Acarer. Feeling increasingly unsafe in Sweden, Dönmez, his wife, and their two children relocated to the United States last week.
Turkish opposition figures living in exile in Sweden, particularly those on a list of political dissidents whose extradition is demanded by the Turkish government, were previously targeted by a pro-government Turkish newspaper, which revealed their home addresses and published secretly taken photographs. In 2022, the Sabah daily published photos of Stockholm-based journalists Abdullah Bozkurt, Bülent Keneş and Levent Kenez — in Stockholm, revealing their addresses and secretly taken photos on their front page.
Erdoğan has even mentioned Keneş by name and demanded his extradition from Sweden.
Sweden’s Supreme Court has, so far, rejected all the extradition requests, arguing that the individuals have not committed any crime under Swedish law and that there is a risk of torture and persecution in Turkey.
However, leaked documents have revealed that Sweden secretly altered its immigration procedures to deny or delay asylum or residency to Turkish dissidents associated with the Gülen movement in order to preserve its diplomatic relations with Turkey.
