DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) \u2014 Iran and Sweden carried out a prisoner swap Saturday that saw Tehran release a European Union 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The arrest of Hamid Nouri by Sweden in 2019 as he traveled there as a tourist likely sparked the detentions of the two Swedes, part of a long-running strategy by Iran since its 1979 Islamic Revolution to use those with ties abroad as bargaining chips in negotiations with the West.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While Iranian state television claimed without evidence that Nouri had been \u201cillegally detained,\u201d Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said diplomat Johan Floderus and a second Swedish citizen, Saeed Azizi, had been facing a \u201chell on earth.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIran has made these Swedes pawns in a cynical negotiation game with the aim of getting the Iranian citizen Hamid Nouri released from Sweden,\u201d Kristersson said Saturday. \u201cIt has been clear all along that this operation would require difficult decisions; now the government has made those decisions.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
State TV aired images of Nouri limping off an airplane at Tehran\u2019s Mehrabad International Airport and being embraced by his family.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI am Hamid Nouri. I am in Iran,\u201d he said. \u201cGod makes me free.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He made a point of repeatedly referencing the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, mocking them with his release. The Iranian dissident group criticized the swap in a statement and said \u201cit will embolden the religious fascism to step up terrorism, hostage-taking and blackmail.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Oman, a sultanate on the eastern edge of the Arabian Peninsula, mediated the release, its state-run news agency reported. Oman long has 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 pilgrimage and typically sees prisoners freed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 the Iranian city of Karaj.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The 1988 mass executions came at the end of Iran\u2019s long war with Iraq. After Iran\u2019s then-Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini accepted a United Nations-brokered cease-fire, members of the Iranian opposition group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, heavily armed by Saddam Hussein, stormed across the Iranian border in a surprise attack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 \u201cdeath commissions.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s orders, though some argue that other top officials were effectively in charge in the months before his 1989 death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Late Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, killed in a helicopter crash in May, also was involved in the mass executions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Floderus\u2019 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Azizi\u2019s 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 Tehran\u2019s Revolutionary Court on charges of \u201cassembly and collusion against national security.\u201d The group said Azizi has cancer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The EU\u2019s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, praised the release of the two men.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cOther EU citizens are still arbitrarily detained in Iran,\u201d he wrote on the social platform X. \u201cWe\u2019ll continue to work for their freedom together\u201d with other EU states.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Late Saturday night, Azizi and Floderus landed in Stockholm and were greeted by Sweden\u2019s Prime Minister, Ulf Kristersson.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Addressing journalists in Stockholm, Kristersson confirmed the men were \u201cfree and they are on Swedish soil again.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThis has been a long period of suffering that is now over for Johan and Saeed, of course, but I also think almost as much for those who have been waiting for them here at home,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Iran long has contended it doesn\u2019t hold prisoners to use in negotiations, despite years of multiple swaps with the U.S. and other nations showing otherwise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The swap, however, did not free Ahmadreza Djalali, a Swedish-Iranian expert on disaster medicine whom a U.N. panel long has described as being arbitrarily detained by Tehran since his arrest in 2016. Djalali faces possible execution after being convicted on charges of \u201ccorruption on Earth\u201d in 2017 following what Amnesty International called a \u201cgrossly unfair trial\u201d in Revolutionary Court.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAhmadreza Djalali\u2019s family was not informed or in any way warned that there was an ongoing deal and that Ahmadreza Djalali was to be left behind, EVEN THOUGH he is the Swedish citizen who has been held hostage the longest,\u201d a campaign seeking his release said on X. \u201cThey read the news today, like anyone else.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
___<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Associated Press writers Amir Vahdat in Tehran, Iran, and Jari Tanner in Helsinki contributed to this report.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) \u2014 Iran and Sweden carried out a prisoner swap Saturday that saw Tehran release a European Union diplomat and another man in exchange for an<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":6418,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_price":"","_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_header":"","_tribe_default_ticket_provider":"","_tribe_ticket_capacity":"0","_ticket_start_date":"","_ticket_end_date":"","_tribe_ticket_show_description":"","_tribe_ticket_show_not_going":false,"_tribe_ticket_use_global_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_global_stock_level":"","_global_stock_mode":"","_global_stock_cap":"","_tribe_rsvp_for_event":"","_tribe_ticket_going_count":"","_tribe_ticket_not_going_count":"","_tribe_tickets_list":"[]","_tribe_ticket_has_attendee_info_fields":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,29,33,108],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-europe-intl","category-international","category-iran-domestic","category-rights-watch"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iranreport.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iranreport.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iranreport.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iranreport.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iranreport.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6417"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/iranreport.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6417\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6419,"href":"https:\/\/iranreport.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6417\/revisions\/6419"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iranreport.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iranreport.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iranreport.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iranreport.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}