Despite pressure to make terrorist groups unwelcome on Swedish soil, one of the nation’s biggest banks, SEB, hosts an active account for the PKK terrorist group, according to a local media source.
Online outlet Fria Tider has reported that pieces of cloth symbolizing the PKK were sold, and the profit from the sale was deposited in a SEB account.
It added that the money was then transferred to the PKK, a terrorist group that has killed thousands of people in attacks on security forces and the public in southeastern Türkiye, northern Syria and some regions of Iraq.
The news comes as new anti-terrorist laws came into force in Sweden on Jan.1, and the new government is being pressed to keep its promises under a memorandum signed last June to crack down on terrorists as a requirement for gaining NATO membership.
SEB spokesperson Niklas Magnusson said in a Jan. 5 statement that, "The bank complies with legislation and is against illegal trade, which constitutes a crime."
But the outlet said the terrorist group's account at the bank and a cellphone number are both still active.
Pointing out that SEB has issued numerous statements over "financing terrorism and money laundering," Fria Tider described the bank's failure to close the accounts of the terrorist group as "hypocrisy."
The PKK is listed as a terrorist organization by Türkiye, the European Union and the United States and is responsible for the deaths of 40,000 people, including women, children and infants in its nearly 40-year bloody campaign.
The terrorist group has been using bases across Türkiye's border in northern Iraq and northern Syria to plot and carry out attacks on Türkiye. The PKK has also been trying to create a terrorist corridor along the Syrian border, threatening both Syrian locals and nearby Turkish residents, as well as exploiting energy sources with U.S. support.
According to Europol's "EU Terrorism Situation & Trend Report 2022," the group continues to "use Europe for fundraising by legal and illegal means," which include "fundraising campaigns and donations, as well as extortion and other organized criminal activities."
Drug trafficking in the EU is one of the criminal activities generating funds for the terrorists where members and supporters are involved in all aspects of the illicit narcotics trade and channel funds for their subversive activities in Türkiye and Syria.
Ankara has been urging Europe to crack down on the rising threat of PKK terrorists for many years and only upped its warnings in the wake of widespread violence by terrorist sympathizers protesting a Dec. 24 attack on a Kurdish cultural center in the French capital Paris that left three dead and more wounded.
A scandalous demonstration by PKK supporters in the Swedish capital Stockholm last Thursday – where a group hung a mannequin likened to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on a pole in front of the historic City Hall – is the latest among a string of provocative rallies the group’s sympathizers have held in the country and across Western Europe.
The widespread presence of terror elements in the continent, especially with stark, public examples in Sweden, has also been a source of discord between Stockholm and Ankara, which only intensified over the past year with the Nordic country’s bid to join NATO alongside Finland following the Russia-Ukraine war. The Turkish government has withheld its approval, strongly criticizing the country for "harboring and tolerating" terrorists from the PKK and the Gülenist Terrorist Group (FETÖ), which it said was a threat to itself and the alliance in general.
The memorandum of understanding the sides inked in June 2022 stipulates that the Nordic countries take "concrete action" to address Ankara’s security concerns, under which Stockholm has taken some steps, but the increasingly prevalent demonstrations by PKK sympathizers, as well as the financial footing the terrorists find in particularly Sweden, continue to pose a major roadblock to their accession.