DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Iran and Sweden held a prisoner swap Saturday that saw Tehran release a European Union diplomat and another man for an Iranian convicted in Stockholm of committing war crimes for his role in the executions 1988 mass shooting in the Islamic Republic. .
Sweden’s arrest of Hamid Nouri in 2019 while traveling there as a tourist likely triggered the arrests of the two Swedes, part of a long-running strategy by Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution to use those with ties abroad as currency. exchange in negotiations with the West.
While Iranian state television claimed, without evidence, that Nouri had been “illegally detained,” Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson described the detentions of diplomat Johan Floderus and Saeed Azizi as the “hell on earth” the two men endured. .
“Iran has turned these Swedes into pawns in a cynical negotiating game aimed at freeing Iranian citizen Hamid Nouri from Sweden,” Kristersson said. “It was clear all along that this operation would require difficult decisions, now the government has made those decisions.”
Oman, a sultanate on the eastern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, mediated the release, its state news agency reported. Oman has long served as an interlocutor between Iran and the West.
In 2022, the Stockholm District Court sentenced Nouri to life in prison for his role in the executions. It identified him as an assistant to the deputy prosecutor at Gohardasht prison, on the outskirts of the Iranian city of Karaj.
The 1988 mass executions occurred at the end of Iran’s long war with Iraq. After Iran’s then supreme leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, accepted a United Nations-brokered ceasefire, members of the Iranian opposition group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, heavily armed by Saddam Hussein, invaded the Iranian border in a surprise attack.
Iran eventually toned down its attack, but the attack set the stage for new sham trials of political prisoners, militants and others, which would become known as “death commissions.”
International human rights groups estimate that around 5,000 people were executed. Iran has never fully recognized the executions, apparently carried out on Khomeini’s orders, although some argue that 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 involved in the mass executions.
Floderus’ family said he was arrested in April 2022 at Tehran airport while returning from vacation with friends. Floderus was detained for months before his family and others publicized his detention.
Azizi’s case was not as prominent as Floderus’s. In February, the group Human Rights Activists in Iran reported that the dual Iranian-Swedish citizen had been sentenced to five years in prison by the Tehran Revolutionary Court on charges of “meeting and collusion against national security”. The group said Azizi has cancer.
The EU’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 for their freedom together” with other EU states.
Iran has long maintained that it does not hold prisoners to use in negotiations, despite years and multiple exchanges with the US and other nations showing otherwise.
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Associated Press writers Amir Vahdat in Tehran, Iran, and Jari Tanner in Helsinki contributed to this report.
