Swedish prisoners held in Iran freed in swap for man convicted for his role in massacre

Two Swedish men held in Iran as "pawns" have been released in exchange for an Iranian man convicted for his role in the massacre of thousands of people in 1988.

Diplomat Johan Floderus and a second Swedish citizen, Saeed Azizi, were detained by the Iran's theocratic government shortly after Hamid Nouri was arrested while on holiday in Sweden in 2019.

Floderus' family said he was arrested in April 2022 at Tehran's international airport while returning from holiday with friends.

Azizi, an 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.” He is reported to have cancer.

Nouri was war crimes was found guilty of being a key figure in the 1988 executions of Iranian political prisoners, where according to different estimates between 2,800 to 30,000 people were massacred.

The Islamic Republic has a long-running strategy of arresting those with ties abroad to be used as bargaining chips in negotiations with the West, although Iran has always denied holding prisoners for this reason.

Swedish prime minister Ulf Kristersson said the Swedish prisoners had faced “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 on Saturday.

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

Iranian state television claimed without evidence that Nouri had been “illegally detained,” after he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

An Iranian dissident group critisised the swap, saying it would only "embolden the religious fascism to step up terrorism, hostage-taking and blackmail.

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

After Iran’s then-Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini accepted a United Nations-brokered ceasefire, members of the Iranian opposition group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, heavily armed by then Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, stormed across the border in a surprise attack.

The assault was surpressed but led to sham retrials of political prisoners and militants, may of who had been in prison at the time of the attack.

The exectutions would become known as “death commissions.”

International rights groups estimate that as many as 5,000 people were executed during that period, which Iran has never fully acknowledged.

Late Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, who was killed in a helicopter crash in May, was involved in the mass executions and became known as 'the Butcher of Tehran'.

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

“Other EU citizens are still arbitrarily detained in Iran,” he wrote on the social platform X. “We'll continue to work for their freedom together” with other EU states.

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