ISTANBUL: Turkey on Saturday called off a visit by Sweden's defence minister over a planned demonstration by a right-wing extremist in Stockholm, reports AFP.
Turkey has been angered by permission obtained by Rasmus Paludan, a Swedish-Danish politician whose anti-Islamist actions sparked riots across Sweden last year, to stage a protest in front of its embassy in the Swedish capital.
Paludan has expressed his intention to burn the Koran, Islam's holy book, during his protest on Saturday.
In April last year, Paludan's announcement of a Koran burning tour for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan sparked riots across Sweden. Turkish presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin on Saturday condemned the planned protest, slamming it as clear crime of hatred.
Allowing this action despite all our warnings is encouraging hate crimes and Islamophobia, he tweeted.
The attack on sacred values is not freedom but modern barbarism.
Turkey had on Friday summoned Sweden's ambassador to condemn this provocative action which is clearly a hate crime -- in strongest terms, a diplomatic source said.
This is the second time in more than a week that Sweden's ambassador to Turkey was summoned.
Last week, he was called to answer for a video posted by a Kurdish group in Stockholm that depicted President Recep Tayyip Erdogan swinging by his legs from a rope.
A tweet by the group, Rojava Committee of Sweden, compared Erdogan to Italy's Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who was hung upside down after his execution in the closing days of World War II.
Sweden, along with neighbouring Finland, needs Turkey's consent to join NATO.
Both countries dropped decades of military non-alignment last year when they applied to join the Western defence alliance in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Ankara says any progress depends on Swedish steps to extradite people it accuses of terrorism or of having played a part in the 2016 coup attempt against Erdogan.
Turkey argues that Sweden has not done enough to crack down on Kurdish groups that Ankara views as terrorist.
