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Iran and Sweden exchange prisoners in Oman-mediated swap
Iran and Sweden announced a prisoner exchange on Saturday that saw a former Iranian official released in Sweden in exchange for a European Union diplomat and a second Swede.
“Hamid Noury, who has been in illegal detention in Sweden since 2019, is free and will return to the country in a few hours,” Kazem Gharibabadi, head of Iran’s High Council for Human Rights, said in a post on social media platform X.
Shortly afterwards, Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said Johan Floderus, an EU diplomat, and a second Swedish national had been released by Iran and were on a flight home.
Floderus, 33, had been held in Iran since April 2022 accused of espionage. He risked being sentenced to death.
Following his release, his father, Matts Floderus, told Swedish news agency TT that the family “are of course terribly happy”.
The other Swede, Saeed Azizi, had been arrested in November 2023.
They are on their way home “and will finally be reunited with their relatives”, Kristersson said.
Gharibabadi said the release of Noury was thanks to efforts led by late Iranian foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, who died in a helicopter crash alongside president Ebrahim Raisi in May.
State media in neutral Oman, which has acted as a mediator between Iran and Western governments in the past, said that following its mediation, the two governments had agreed to the “mutual release” of detained nationals.
“Those released were transferred from Tehran and Stockholm to Muscat today, 15 June 2024, for their repatriation,” the official Oman News Agency said.
Noury landed at Tehran’s Mehrabad airport at around 5:30 pm where he was welcomed by family members and officials including Gharibabadi, state television footage showed
A former Iranian prisons official, Noury was arrested at Stockholm airport in November 2019 and later sentenced to life in prison over mass killings in Iranian jails in 1988.
The 63-year-old thanked the officials and the people of Iran for his release.
He lashed out at the former rebel People’s Mujahedin of Iran (MEK) whose activists were instrumental in his prosecution and conviction in Sweden, calling them “traitors who have sold their country.”
At least 5,000 prisoners were killed in Iranian jails in 1988 to avenge attacks carried out by the MEK in the closing stages of the Iran-Iraq war when it was fighting alongside Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s troops.
The MEK, which remains outlawed as a “terrorist” organization in Iran, slammed Sweden’s decision to release Noury as “shameful and unjustifiable”.
He said the exchange would embolden Iran “to step up terrorism, hostage-taking and blackmail”.
A Swedish court had found Noury guilty of “grave breaches of international humanitarian law and murder” but he had argued he was on leave during the period in question.
Iran condemned the sentence but Sweden insisted the trial was held under its principle of universal jurisdiction, which allows it to try a case regardless of where the alleged offense took place.
Kristersson said Iran had made Floderus and Azizi “pawns in a cynical negotiation game, to get Iranian citizen Hamid Noury released from prison in Sweden”.
He added that, as prime minister, he had “a special responsibility for the safety of Swedish citizens. The government has therefore worked intensively on the issue, together with the Swedish security service, which has negotiated with Iran.”
Kristersson added: “It has been clear all along that the operation would require some difficult decisions. Now we have made those decisions.”
At least two other Swedish citizens remain in custody in Iran, including dual national Ahmad Reza Jalali, who is on death row after being convicted of espionage.
Tehran does not recognize dual nationality.
At least six other Europeans are detained in Iran, from Austria, Britain, France and Germany.
On Thursday, French citizen Louis Arnaud, 36, returned to Paris after spending more than 20 months incarcerated in Iran on national security charges.
Activists and some Western governments accuse Iran of pursuing a strategy of taking foreign nationals as hostages to force concessions from the West.
Last year, Oman helped mediate a swap deal between Iran and the United States, as well as facilitating the release of six European detainees in Iran.
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The U.S. will remove all its forces and equipment from a small base in Niger this weekend and fewer than 500 remaining troops will leave a critical drone base in the West African country in August, ahead of a Sept. 15 deadline set in an agreement with the new ruling junta, the American commander there said Friday.
Air Force Maj. Gen. Kenneth Ekman said in an interview that a number of small teams of 10-20 U.S. troops, including special operations forces, have moved to other countries in West Africa. But the bulk of the forces will go, at least initially, to Europe.
Tech. Sgt. Christopher Dyer / AP
Niger’s ouster of American troops following a coup last year has broad ramifications for the U.S. because it is forcing troops to abandon the critical drone base that was used for counterterrorism missions in the Sahel.
Ekman and other U.S. military leaders have said other West African nations want to work with the U.S. and may be open to an expanded American presence. He did not detail the locations, but other U.S. officials have pointed to the Ivory Coast and Ghana as examples.
Ekman, who serves as the director for strategy at U.S. Africa Command, is leading the U.S. military withdrawal from the small base at the airport in Niger’s capital of Niamey and from the larger counterterrorism base in the city of Agadez. He said there will be a ceremony Sunday marking the completed pullout from the airport base, then those final 100 troops and the last C-17 transport aircraft will depart.
Speaking to reporters from The Associated Press and Reuters from the U.S. embassy in Niamey, Ekman said that while portable buildings and vehicles that are no longer useful will be left behind, a lot of larger equipment will be pulled out. For example, he said 18 4,000-pound (1,800-kilograms) generators worth more than $1 million each will be taken out of Agadez.
Unlike the withdrawal from Afghanistan, he said the U.S. is not destroying equipment or facilities as it leaves.
“Our goal in the execution is, leave things in as good a state as possible,” he said. “If we went out and left it a wreck or we went out spitefully, or if we destroyed things as we went, we’d be foreclosing options” for future security relations.
AFP via Getty
Niger’s ruling junta ordered U.S. forces out of the country in the wake of last July’s ouster of the country’s democratically elected president by mutinous soldiers. French forces had also been asked to leave as the junta turned to the Russian mercenary group Wagner for security assistance.
Washington officially designated the military takeover as a coup in October, triggering U.S. laws restricting the military support and aid.
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