Iran, Sweden swap prisoners in Oman mediated exchange

Iran and Sweden carried out a prisoner swap on Saturday that saw Tehran release a European Union diplomat and another man in exchange for an Iranian convicted in Stockholm of committing war crimes over his part in 1988 mass executions in the Islamic Republic.

The arrest of Hamid Nouri by Sweden in 2019 as he travelled there as a tourist likely sparked the detentions of the two Swedes, part of a long-running strategy by Iran since its 1979 Islamic Revolution to use those with ties abroad as bargaining chips in negotiations with the West.

Oman, a sultanate on the eastern edge of the Arabian Peninsula, mediated the release, its state-run news agency reported. Oman long has served as an interlocutor between Iran and the West.

While Iranian state television claimed without evidence that Nouri had been “illegally detained,” Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said diplomat Johan Floderus and a second Swedish citizen, Saeed Azizi, had been facing a “hell on earth.”

“Iran has made these Swedes pawns in a cynical negotiation game with the aim of getting the Iranian citizen Hamid Nouri ​​released from Sweden," Kristersson said Saturday.

“It has been clear all along that this operation would require difficult decisions; now the government has made those decisions."

Mass executions

In 2022, the Stockholm District Court sentenced Nouri to life in prison over his role in the executions. It identified him as an assistant to the deputy prosecutor at the Gohardasht prison outside the Iranian city of Karaj.

The 1988 mass executions came at the end of Iran’s long war with Iraq.

International rights groups estimate that as many as 5,000 people were executed. Iran has never fully acknowledged the executions.

Floderus' family said he was arrested in April 2022 at the Tehran airport while returning from a vacation with friends.

Floderus, had been held for months before his family and others went public with his detention.

Azizi's case was not as prominent as Floderus'. In February, the group Human Rights Activists in Iran reported that the dual Iranian-Swedish national had been sentenced to five years in prison by Tehran's Revolutionary Court on charges of “assembly and collusion against national security.” The group said Azizi has cancer.

The EU’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, praised the release of the two men.