DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Iran and Sweden carried out a prisoner swap Saturday in which Tehran released an Iranian convicted of war crimes in Stockholm for involvement in a 1988 mass execution in Iran, as well as a European Union diplomat and another man.
The detention of the two Swedes likely began with the arrest of Hamid Nouri in Sweden while traveling there as a tourist in 2019. This is part of a long-standing Iranian strategy since the 1979 Iranian Revolution to use people with overseas ties as bargaining chips with the West.
While Iranian state television claimed without evidence that Nouri had been “illegally detained”, Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Christersson described the detention of diplomats Johan Floders and Saeed Azizi as “hell on earth” they faced.
“Iran is using the Swedes as pawns in a cynical negotiating game to free Iranian citizen Hamid Nouri from Sweden,” Kristerson said. “It was clear from the start that this operation would require difficult decisions, and now the government has made those decisions.”
The release was brokered by the Sultanate of Oman, on the eastern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, and a long-time mediator between Iran and the West, the state news agency reported.
In 2022, the Stockholm District Court sentenced Nouri to life imprisonment for his role in the execution. The court identified Nouri as the deputy prosecutor of Gohardasht prison on the outskirts of the Iranian city of Karaj.
The 1988 mass executions came at the end of Iran’s long war with Iraq, when members of Saddam Hussein’s heavily armed Iranian opposition group, the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, launched a surprise attack across the Iranian border after Iran’s then-Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini accepted a UN-brokered ceasefire.
Iran eventually toned down the attacks, but they set the stage for spurious retrials of political prisoners and militants, known as “death committees.”
International human rights groups estimate that as many as 5,000 people were executed. The Iranian government has never fully acknowledged the executions, which were apparently ordered by Khomeini, but some allege that other senior officials effectively oversaw the executions in the months before Khomeini’s death in 1989.
Iran’s late President Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash in May, was also implicated in the mass executions.
‘Tehran’s Butcher’ Raisi killed in helicopter crash, EU rushes to send condolences to Iranhttps://t.co/TgXBexHjk9
—Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) May 20, 2024
According to Froderus’ family, he was arrested at Tehran airport while returning from a holiday with friends in April 2022. He was held for several months before his family made his detention public.
Azizi’s case has received less attention than Floderus’. In February, the Iranian Human Rights Activists group reported that the dual Iranian-Swedish citizen was sentenced to five years in prison by a Tehran Revolutionary Court for “assembly and collusion against national security.” The group said Azizi had cancer.
The EU’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, praised their release.
“Other EU citizens remain arbitrarily detained in Iran,” he wrote on social platform X. “We will continue to fight for their freedom together with other EU countries.”
Iran has long maintained that it is not holding prisoners to use in negotiations, but multiple exchanges over the years with the United States and other countries suggest this is not the case.
