Leaving a Swedish Iranian on death row in Tehran: “Unacceptable” act

Siamak Namazi, an Iranian-American businessman who was formerly imprisoned in Iran, criticized Sweden’s recent prisoner exchange with Iran that left Swedish-Iranian doctor Ahmadreza Djalali on death row in Tehran.

“I am a former hostage… I endured Evin, Iran’s most notorious prison, and I cannot understand how Sweden can let its citizens die there,” Namazi wrote. in an opinion piece for the Guardian on Friday.

Under the Stockholm-Tehran agreement of 15 June, two Swedish citizens, Johan Floderus and Saeed Azizi, were exchanged for Hamid Nouri, a former prison officer serving a life sentence in Sweden for war crimes for his role in mass executions of political prisoners in Iran in 1988. Sweden stated that Iran rejected negotiations the release of Djalali as part of the deal.

“I am overjoyed to see Floderus and Azizi back home with their loved ones, but Stockholm’s decision to enter into this deal and leave behind a Swedish citizen facing execution in Iran was unconscionable,” Namazi wrote.

Namazi argued that Sweden’s failure to secure Djalali’s release reflected a disturbing hierarchy in the valuation of its citizens’ lives and a serious negotiating error.

“I believe Sweden could have secured the release of all its nationals and several other European hostages if it had recognized the value of the card it held,” Namazi added.

Facing the death penalty, Djalali recently went on hunger strike as a last resort. In a message from Evin prison, he criticized the Swedish Prime Minister for excluding him from the agreement.

Namazi also referred to Djalali’s recent hunger strike, adding that this was not the first time Dajali had been excluded from a prisoner exchange.

“I was still in Evin prison when Ahmadreza was excluded from the Belgian deal. As someone who had experienced the despair of being excluded from hostage situations several times, I understood his pain – even though I was not on death row,” Namazi wrote.

In May 2023, Iran released a prisoner exchange agreement with Brussels The Belgian development worker Olivier Vandecasteele with Assadollah Assadi, an Iranian diplomat convicted of a bomb plot an Iranian opposition rally in Paris in 2018.

Namazi wrote that Djalai was “supposedly the leading candidate” for the exchange for Assadi, but “his fate changed when Sweden arrested and convicted Nouri, who had close ties to some of the highest-ranking figures in the Islamic Republic.”

In December 2023, Amnesty International issued a statement saying that Djalali was “at grave risk of imminent reprisal execution” – the week that the Swedish Court of Appeal upheld Hamid Nouri’s life sentence.

Namazi also shared details of the time he spent with Djalali in Evin:

“He told me about the times his captors brought him to the brink of execution to put pressure on his would-be rescuers, and how he was once thrown back into a solitary cell for five months to await his death.”

“One morning, his sadistic prison guards told him he would be hanged at sunrise the next day and said they had made a final call to his wife to say goodbye. He wished they had killed him in the first year of his imprisonment,” Namazi wrote, highlighting the psychological torture Djalali was subjected to.

Djalali, a disaster medicine specialist, was arrested in 2016 while visiting Tehran. He was sentenced to death in 2017 on trumped-up charges without due process. He remains on hunger strike and his condition is deteriorating, human rights groups, activists and his wife, Vida Mehrannia, warn.

Namazi, who was imprisoned in Iran for eight years, was sentenced to ten years in prison on October 1, 2012. fabricated accusations of “collaboration with a foreign government”He was released on September 18, 2023, as part of a prisoner exchange with Iran brokered by the Biden administration, in which the United States released five Iranian prisoners and paid the Iranian government $6 billion.