Iran and Sweden on Saturday carried out a prisoner swap in which Tehran release an EU diplomat and another man in exchange for an Iranian convicted in Stockholm of committing war crimes over his part in 1988 mass executions in the Islamic Republic.
Sweden arresting Hamid Nouri in 2019 as he traveled there as a tourist likely sparked the detentions of the two Swedes, part of a long-running strategy by Tehran since its 1979 Iranian Revolution to use those with ties abroad as bargaining chips in negotiations with the West.
While Iranian state television reported without evidence that Nouri had been “illegally detained,” Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said that diplomat Johan Floderus and a second Swedish citizen, Saeed Azizi, had been facing a “hell on earth.”
Photo: AP
“Iran has made these Swedes pawns in a cynical negotiation game with the aim of getting the Iranian citizen Hamid Nouri released from Sweden,” Kristersson said. “It has been clear all along that this operation would require difficult decisions; now the government has made those decisions.”
State TV aired images of Nouri limping off an airplane at Tehran’s Mehrabad International Airport and being embraced by his family.
“I am Hamid Nouri. I am in Iran,” he said. “God makes me free.”
He made a point of repeatedly referencing the Mujahidin-e-Khalq, mocking them with his release.
The Iranian dissident group criticized the swap in a statement and said that “it will embolden the religious fascism to step up terrorism, hostage-taking and blackmail.”
Oman mediated the release, its state-run news agency reported. The sultanate on the eastern edge of the Arabian Peninsula has long served as an interlocutor between Iran and the West.
The swap comes as the Muslim world celebrates Eid al-Adha, which marks the end of the hajj and typically sees prisoners freed.
In 2022, the Stockholm District Court sentenced Nouri to life in prison. It identified him as an assistant to the deputy prosecutor at the Gohardasht Prison outside Karaj, Iran.
The 1988 mass executions came at the end of Iran’s long war with Iraq. After then-Iranian supreme leader Ruhollah Khomeini accepted a UN-brokered ceasefire, Mujahidin-e-Khalq members, heavily armed by then-Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, stormed across the Iranian border in a surprise attack.
Iran ultimately blunted their assault, but the attack set the stage for the sham retrials of political prisoners, militants and others that would become known as “death commissions.”
International rights groups estimate that as many as 5,000 people were executed. Iran has never fully acknowledged the executions, apparently carried out on Khomeini’s orders, although some say that other top officials were effectively in charge in the months before his 1989 death.
Floderus’ family said he was arrested in April 2022 at the Tehran airport while returning from a vacation with friends. Floderus had been held for months before his family and others went public with his detention.
Azizi’s case was not as prominent, 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 Iranian Revolutionary Court on charges of “assembly and collusion against national security.”
The group said Azizi has cancer.
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