DUBAI/LONDON: A Swedish-Iranian national sentenced to death in Iran on charges of spying for Israeli intelligence is to be executed this month, Iran’s semi-official ISNA news agency said on Wednesday, citing sources.
Ahmadreza Djalali, a disaster medicine doctor and researcher, was arrested in 2016 on an academic visit to Iran and is to be executed by May 21, ISNA said.
The report comes as Hamid Noury, a former Iranian prosecution official arrested by Swedish authorities in 2019, faces a life sentence in Sweden on charges of international war crimes and human rights abuses.
Noury is accused of playing a leading role in the killing of political prisoners executed on government orders at the Gohardasht prison in Karaj, Iran, in 1988.
The Swedish foreign ministry did not immediately comment on the ISNA report.
The US said it is following the case very closely because it is “an egregious case of arbitrary detention,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said.
The State Department, along with the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Iran, have highlighted Djalali’s case and human reports on human rights conditions in Iran, he told reporters during a press briefing.
“Iran does have a long history of unjust imprisonment of foreign nationals for use as political leverage,” Price said. “It continues to engage in a range of human rights abuses, which include large-scale arbitrary or unlawful detention of individuals, some of whom have faced torture or worse, in some cases execution, after a failure to receive due process and enduring unjust trials.”
Price said the UD routinely discusses with with its allies and partners to determine how best to address “this shameful practice of wrongful detention,” and how to safely release their nationals.
Under Swedish law, courts can try Swedish citizens and other nationals for crimes against international law committed abroad.
Iran’s foreign ministry summoned the Swedish ambassador on Monday to convey the Islamic Republic’s objection “to the baseless and fabricated accusations that the Swedish prosecutor made against Iran during Noury’s court case,” ISNA reported in an earlier article.
(With Reuters)
