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IRAN

Iran to execute Swedish-Iranian academic in May: report

A Swedish-Iranian academic convicted of spying for Israel is set to be executed in Iran later this month, a news agency in the country reported on Wednesday.

Iran to execute Swedish-Iranian academic in May: report
A 2017 demonstration outside the Iranian Embassy in Stockholm calling on Iran to free Djalali. Photo: Hossein Salmanzadeh/TT

Ahmadreza Djalali, formerly based in Stockholm where he worked at the Karolinska Institute, was arrested during a visit to Iran in April 2016.

He was sentenced to death in 2017 after being found guilty of passing information about two Iranian nuclear scientists to Israel’s Mossad spy agency that led to their assassinations.

Citing informed sources, ISNA news agency said on Wednesday that his death sentence would be carried out by May 21.

Djalali was granted Swedish citizenship while in detention in February 2018, a few months after Iran’s supreme court confirmed the death sentence.

United Nations rights experts said in March 2021 that he was in critical condition after months of solitary confinement and called for his release.

Wednesday’s report comes on the last day of the trial in Stockholm of Hamid Noury, a former Iranian prison official.

Noury, 61, stands accused of crimes against humanity and war crimes for alleged involvement in the executions of a large number of inmates in the 1980s.

The prosecution said the prisoners were members of the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, an exiled opposition organisation that Tehran considers a “terrorist group”, as well as other outlawed groups.

Lawyers for Noury, who was arrested at Stockholm airport in November 2019, have denied he was present for the alleged killings.

Iran said on Monday that it had summoned Sweden’s ambassador after prosecutors in the Nordic country sought a life sentence for Noury.

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SWEDEN AND IRAN

Swedish foreign minister confronts Iran over murder plot against Jews

Sweden's foreign minister said Thursday he had confronted his Iranian counterpart after reports Tehran's intelligence service sent an undercover couple to murder Jews in the country.

Swedish foreign minister confronts Iran over murder plot against Jews

Last week, Swedish Radio (SR), reported that a couple, Mahdi Ramezani and Fereshteh Sanaeifarid, had been suspected of planning to kill Jewish representatives in Sweden in 2021.

They arrived in Sweden posing as Afghan refugees in 2017, said the report.

“It is of course something extremely negative that a country is pursuing murder plots on our territory,” Foreign Minister Tobias Billström told the broadcaster.

The couple were arrested in April 2021 on suspicion of conspiracy to commit a terrorist crime, SR reported.

Due to a lack of evidence, they were never charged but were deported in 2022 for posing a security risk. According to SR, the Iranian couple denied the allegations.

“That Iranian agents on Swedish soil have plotted murders of Swedish citizens – and that these citizens are also of Jewish background – is of course something we take very seriously,” Billström said.

“I made this clear to my Iranian colleague, how we look at this and also of course how it affects the relationship between our countries,” he added.

Billström said he would raise the issue with his counterparts in the EU.

“This is a matter of general interest in the EU… and it may be beneficial for cooperation between EU member states to exchange ideas on this,” he told SR.

While the investigation into the couple is classified, SR cited sources saying that the two were working on behalf of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, IRGC.

The alleged agents had reportedly identified three different targets, gathering addresses and photographs.

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