Hamid Noury, accused of collaborating within the 1988 bloodbath of political prisoners in Iran, sits with lawyer Thomas Soderqvist throughout his trial, on this courtroom sketch, on the District Court docket in Stockholm, Sweden, on November 23 2021. Picture: TT Information Company by way of Reuters
Iran and Sweden carried out a prisoner swap on Saturday that includes the discharge of Hamid Nouri, convicted of struggle crimes by Sweden for mass executions in 1988 within the Islamic Republic, in change for a European Union diplomat and one other detained man. for Tehran.
Iran freed Johan Floderus, a Swede who had been working for the EU diplomatic corps, in addition to a person recognized as Saeed Azizi by Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson.
“They’re now on a aircraft again to Sweden and can quickly be reunited with their households,” Kristersson wrote on social platform X.
Swedish EU diplomat Johan Floderus | Picture credit score: AFP
Oman mediated the change, Oman’s state information company reported. Iranian state tv reported that Nouri had already been launched and would return to Tehran.
In 2022, Stockholm District Court docket sentenced Nouri to life in jail for his function within the executions. He recognized him as a deputy assistant prosecutor at Gohardasht jail, exterior the Iranian metropolis of Karaj.
The 1988 mass executions got here on the finish of Iran’s lengthy struggle with Iraq. After Iran’s then supreme chief Ruhollah Khomeini accepted a United Nations-brokered ceasefire, members of Saddam Hussein’s closely armed Iranian opposition group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq stormed throughout the Iranian border right into a shock assault.
Iran finally mitigated its assault, however the assault set the stage for sham retrials of political prisoners, militants and others that might develop into referred to as “demise commissions.”
Worldwide rights teams estimate that about 5,000 individuals had been executed. Iran has by no means totally acknowledged the executions, apparently carried out on Khomeini’s orders, though some argue that different senior officers had been certainly in cost within the months earlier than his demise in 1989.
The late Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi, killed in a helicopter crash in Might, was additionally concerned within the mass executions.
Floderus’ household mentioned he was arrested in April 2022 at Tehran airport whereas getting back from a trip with associates. His arrest represented one more case of Tehran utilizing foreigners or twin nationals as pawns in negotiations with the West.
Azizi’s case was not as outstanding as Floderus’. In February, the group Human Rights Activists in Iran reported that the Tehran Revolutionary Court docket had sentenced the Iranian-Swedish twin nationwide to 5 years in jail on costs of “meeting and collusion towards nationwide safety.” The group mentioned Azizi has most cancers.