Iran, Sweden agree to prisoner swap freeing man convicted of war crimes following 1988 executions

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Iran and Sweden carried out a prisoner swap Saturday in which Tehran freed a European Union diplomat and another man in exchange for an Iranian convicted in Stockholm of war crimes for his role in the 1988 mass executions in the United Arab Emirates. Islamic Republic.

Sweden’s arrest of Hamid Nouri in 2019 while he was visiting as a tourist likely triggered the detention of the two Swedes, part of a long-standing strategy by Iran since the revolution Islamic law of 1979 aimed at using those with ties abroad as bargaining chips in negotiations. with the West.

While Iranian state television claimed without evidence that Nouri had been “illegally detained”, Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said diplomat Johan Floderus and a second Swedish citizen, Saeed Azizi, were facing “hell on earth “.

“Iran has made these Swedes pawns in a cynical negotiating game in an attempt to secure the release of Iranian citizen Hamid Nouri from Sweden,” Kristersson said on Saturday. “It was clear from the start that this operation would require difficult decisions; now the government has made these decisions.

State television broadcast footage of Nouri limping off a plane at Tehran’s Mehrabad International Airport and being embraced by his family.

“My name is Hamid Nouri. I am in Iran,” he said. “God sets me free.”

He made a point of making several references to the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, mocking them during his release. The Iranian dissident group criticized the exchange in a statement and said “it will encourage religious fascism to intensify terrorism, hostage-taking and blackmail.”

Oman, a sultanate on the eastern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, negotiated the release, its official news agency reported. Oman has long served as an interlocutor between Iran and the West. The exchange comes as the Muslim world celebrates Eid al-Adha, which marks the end of the Hajj pilgrimage and usually sees the release of prisoners.

In 2022, the Stockholm District Court sentenced Nouri to life in prison. It identified him as an assistant deputy prosecutor at Gohardasht prison, outside the Iranian city of Karaj.

The mass executions of 1988 took place at the end of the long war between Iran and Iraq. After Ruhollah Khomeini, then supreme leader of Iran, agreed to a United Nations-brokered ceasefire, members of the Iranian opposition group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, heavily armed by Saddam Hussein, crossed the Iranian border in a surprise attack.

Iran eventually blunted its assault, but the attack opened the way for new sham trials of political prisoners, activists and others, which would become known as “death commissions.”

International rights groups estimate that up to 5,000 people were executed. Iran has never fully acknowledged the executions, apparently carried out on Khomeini’s orders, although some say other senior officials were actually in charge in the months before his death in 1989.

The late Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, killed in a helicopter crash in May, was also implicated in the mass executions.

Floderus’ family said he was arrested in April 2022 at Tehran airport while returning from vacation with friends. Floderus had been detained for months before his family and others made his detention public.

Azizi’s case was not as high-profile, but in February the group Human Rights Activists in Iran reported that the dual Iranian-Swedish national had been sentenced to five years in prison by the Tehran Revolutionary Court for “gathering and collusion against national security.” The group said Azizi had cancer.

Europe’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, welcomed the release of the two men.

“Other EU citizens are still arbitrarily detained in Iran,” he wrote on social platform X. “We will continue to work together for their freedom” with other EU states.

Iran has long claimed that it does not hold prisoners for use in negotiations, despite years of multiple exchanges with the United States and other countries demonstrating otherwise.

This exchange, however, did not free Ahmadreza Djalali, a Swedish-Iranian expert in disaster medicine whom a group of UN experts has long described as being arbitrarily detained by Tehran since his arrest in 2016. Djalali risks to be executed after being found guilty of “corruption”. on Earth” in 2017 following what Amnesty International called a “grossly unfair trial” before the Revolutionary Court.

“Ahmadreza Djalali’s family was not informed or warned in any way that a deal was being made and that Ahmadreza Djalali was to be left behind, EVEN THOUGH he is the Swedish citizen who was held hostage the longest,” said a campaign seeking his release. on X. “They read the news today, like everyone else. »

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Associated Press writers Amir Vahdat in Tehran, Iran, and Jari Tanner in Helsinki contributed to this report.