Iran rules out prisoner exchange with Sweden: judiciary

The Iranian judiciary rejected Tuesday the possibility of a prisoner swap in which a former Iranian official on trial in Stockholm for war crimes would be exchanged for a Swedish-Iranian academic on death row.

The two cases “have nothing to do with each other… as a result, there is no question of an exchange,” said Zabihollah Khodayian, spokesman for the judiciary, at a press conference in Tehran.

The remarks come as former prison official Hamid Noury, 61, is set to be sentenced in July in a trial in Sweden.

He was arrested in November 2019 and faces charges including crimes against humanity and war crimes for his role in the killing of as many as 5,000 prisoners across Iran in 1988 during the Iran-Iraq war.

As his trial came to a close last week, Iranian media reported that Swedish-Iranian academic Ahmadreza Djalali would be executed by May 21, after he was sentenced to death in 2017 over espionage for Israel.

He was found guilty of passing information about two Iranian nuclear scientists to Israel’s Mossad spy agency that led to their assassinations.

The judiciary spokesman said that Noury is “innocent and his trial is illegitimate”, while Djalali was “arrested two years prior” to the former official.

“A final verdict was issued” against the academic, and the Iranian judiciary will act accordingly, Khodayian added.

The trial of Noury has heightened tensions between Tehran and Stockholm.

The Swedish foreign ministry announced on Friday that Iranian authorities had detained another of its citizens. Stockholm had previously warned against non-essential travel to Iran.