The hanging of a statue of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that shows him dangling by the leg from a rope in Stockholm does not warrant a criminal investigation, prosecutors said on Friday.
“The decision has been taken not to start a preliminary investigation,” a spokesman for the Swedish Prosecution Service told AFP, giving no further details.
Speaking to Aftonbladet newspaper, public prosecutor Lucas Eriksson said he had received a “defamatory” complaint about the statue.
“But I don’t think it can be defamation,” Eriksson told the newspaper.
The incident further strained relations between Sweden and Turkey, which has yet to ratify Sweden’s NATO accession.
Turkey summoned Sweden’s ambassador to Ankara last week after Sweden’s Kurdish Rojava Committee compared Erdogan to the late Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.
“History shows how dictators end,” the group wrote on Twitter, accompanied by a video showing images of Mussolini’s execution in 1945 and then a doll dressed as Erdogan swinging from a rope outside Stockholm City Hall.
The move was condemned by Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson and Foreign Minister Tobias Billstrom, both of whom called it an attempt to “sabotage” Sweden’s NATO membership bid.
Sweden and its Nordic neighbor Finland ended decades of military non-alignment last year when they applied to join a Western defense alliance in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Turkey and Hungary are the only NATO members that have yet to ratify the offer with a vote in parliament.
Ankara says that Sweden, in particular, has failed to fulfill a series of commitments made by the country at a NATO summit in June.
Erdogan then raised objections to the application in return for a promise to crack down on Kurdish groups Ankara considers “terrorists”.
Sweden has begun to approve constitutional amendments that will make it possible to pass tough anti-terror laws.
On Saturday, Erdogan’s foreign policy adviser Ibrahim Kalin told reporters that the country was “not in a position” to ratify Sweden’s NATO membership.