Iran says Swedish court ruling against ex-official 'unjust', to seek his release

Iran says Swedish court ruling against ex-official 'unjust', to seek his release

Iran said on Monday it would keep seeking the release of a former Iranian official sentenced in Sweden to life in prison over a mass execution of political prisoners in Iran.

"This unjust and outrageous ruling does not end Iran's diplomatic efforts to repatriate and free this Iranian citizen, and we will use all legal and available means," Foreign Ministry spokesperson Nasser Kanaani said, without specifying.

Last Tuesday, a Swedish appeals court upheld the guilty verdict and life sentence for murder and serious crimes against international law for the former official Hamid Noury.

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Relations between Sweden and Iran have soured since 2019 when Sweden arrested Noury for his part in the mass execution and torture of political prisoners in the 1980s.

"We seriously object to the verdict and to what has taken place during this citizen's long period of detention… and his basic rights have not been respected in Sweden's prisons," Kanaani added at a weekly news conference.

Earlier in December, Iran began the trial of a Swedish national, Johan Floderus, employed by the European Union who is charged with spying for Israel and "corruption on earth," a crime that carries the death penalty.

Rights groups and Western governments have accused the Islamic Republic of trying to extract political concessions from other countries through arrests on security charges that may have been trumped up.

Tehran says such arrests are based on its criminal code and it denies holding people for political reasons.

Rights groups have also warned that Ahmadreza Djalali, a Swedish-Iranian national sentenced to death in Iran on charges of spying for Israel, may be executed following the verdict against Noury.

A spokesperson for Sweden's foreign ministry said on Monday that it had been alerted to the information issued by rights groups, but said this had not been confirmed.

“Ahmadreza Djalali's situation is continuously raised with high-level representatives of Iran. Sweden has long demanded that the death penalty not be carried out,” the spokesperson said.

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Djalali, a disaster medicine doctor and researcher, was arrested in 2016 while on an academic visit to Iran.