Swedish-Iranian prisoner begins hunger strike

Ahmadreza Jalali, an Iranian-Swedish academic who has faced execution in Iran for eight years, will begin a hunger strike this week.

“The only way to make his voice heard in the world is to start a hunger strike,” his wife Vida Mehrannia said on Wednesday.

Last month, Iran released two Swedes in exchange for 63-year-old Hamid Nouri, a former Iranian prison officer who was sentenced to life in prison in Sweden in 2022 for his role in mass killings in Iranian prisons in 1988.

The two Swedes are EU diplomat Johan Floderus, who has been held in Iran since April 2022 on espionage charges, and Iranian-Swedish Saeed Azizi, who was arrested in November.

Mr Jalali, who is imprisoned in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison after being convicted of espionage, would not benefit from the exchange.

In an audio message on 19 June, Mr Jalali criticised Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson for his decision to “leave me at enormous risk of execution”.

In a statement to AFP on Tuesday, Ms Mehrannia said: “As a doctor, Ahmadreza knows only too well that a hunger strike is potentially fatal due to his fragile physical condition, but he sees no other option.”

She said he was suffering from “cardiac arrhythmia, bradycardia, hypotension, chronic gastritis, anemia and extreme weight loss due to his two previous hunger strikes.”

“This doctor, loving husband and father of two children wants to be reunited with his family,” she said.

“He wants to serve society again as a committed doctor. He wants to be recognized and treated as a human being again.”

“Ahmadreza is now asking the world for help. He wants this endless brutality to end.”

Iranian authorities had announced plans to execute Mr Jalali in 2022, but the plan was postponed after his lawyers filed an appeal.

Iran had already threatened to execute Mr Jalali in 2020 when a Belgian court was considering the verdicts in the case of Assadollah Assadi, an Iranian intelligence chief accused of plotting to blow up a dissident rally in France.

The threat of immediate execution was lifted, even after Assadi had already been sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Last year, when Mr Nouri was convicted for his role in Iran’s prison massacres, Iranian media released a propaganda video featuring Mr Jalali’s forced “confessions”.

In December 2023, he was again informed that he would be executed.

The Swedish government stressed that it had tried to secure Mr Jalali’s release, but Tehran had refused to recognise him as a Swedish citizen because he was only an Iranian citizen at the time of his arrest and only received Swedish citizenship later.

“We had the choice of either bringing Johan and Saeed home or giving up everything. That is the brutal truth, but I have a lot of respect for their disappointment,” Mr Kristersson told SVT on Tuesday about Ms Mehrannia.

A meeting with Foreign Minister Tobias Billström is planned for July 2 to discuss her husband’s case.

In recent years, Iran has been accused of holding dual nationals and foreign citizens hostage in order to use them as bargaining chips to force concessions.

Last year, five US citizens held by Iran were released in exchange for Washington allowing international banks to transfer $6 billion worth of frozen Iranian money from South Korea to Qatar.

Updated: June 25, 2024, 11:01 p.m.