Iran and Sweden have agreed to release two Swedish nationals, including a European official held in Tehran for over two years, in exchange for an Iranian convicted of war crimes over the mass killing of Iranian prisoners in 1988.
Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson tweeted Saturday that Swedish citizens Johan Floderus and Saeed Azizi were “released after being imprisoned without reason by Iran.”
“The Swedish government has worked intensively for them to be released,” he continued. “Today, they will land on Swedish soil and be reunited with their families and loved ones. Welcome home!”
An Iranian official confirmed the release of Hamid Nouri, writing on social media that he would arrive in Iran in the coming hours and saying that he had been held “illegally” in Sweden.
The freed prisoners were transferred from Tehran and Stockholm to Oman, which mediated the deal, on Saturday ahead of their return to their respective countries, Oman’s Foreign Ministry wrote on social media.
Nouri was arrested in Sweden in 2019 and later convicted of war crimes over the mass execution of political prisoners in Iran in 1988, under the principle of universal jurisdiction, a legal principle that some crimes are so grave that territorial restraints on prosecutions shouldn’t apply. Nouri was the first Iranian to be tried and convicted using that principle.
He was given a life sentence in 2022, in what Amnesty International described at the time as “an unequivocal, and long overdue, message to the Iranian authorities that those responsible for crimes against humanity in Iran will not escape justice.”
Human rights groups accused Iran’s late President Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash last month, of a role in the same killings. Amnesty International said Raisi was part of “death commission” that, on Khomeini’s orders, “forcibly disappeared” and executed thousands of dissidents in prisons near Tehran in 1988.
Floderus, a 33-year-old Swedish national and official working for the European Union, was arrested as he prepared to leave Iran after a private tourist trip with friends in April 2022. The European Union’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, called for his immediate release late last year, arguing that Floderus was “arbitrarily detained in Iran.”
Azizi, whose case was not as high profile as the other prisoners involved in the swap, was arrested in November 2023, according to the Swedish prime minister. The activist news agency HRANA reported in March that Azizi has cancer and had been sentenced to five years in prison.
“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, according to the Associated Press. “It has been clear all along that this operation would require difficult decisions, now the government has made those decisions.”
Borrell on Saturday welcomed Floderus and Azizi’s release and pledged to “continue to work” to free other E.U. citizens held in Iran.
Agnes Callamard, the secretary general of Amnesty International and former U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, said in December that another Swedish national, Ahmadreza Djalali, was “at risk of execution in retaliation” for Sweden’s conviction of Hamid Nouri.
Last year, the United States and Iran freed 10 people in a prisoner swap. Five Americans, including dual national Siamak Namazi, who had been detained in Iran for almost eight years, were released, while the U.S. government freed five Iranians and unblocked the transfer of $6 billion in frozen Iranian oil funds.
Other foreign and dual nationals remain imprisoned in Iran, including U.S. residents, with activists and relatives arguing that many are being held on spurious charges for diplomatic leverage.
(c) Washington Post
