Iran International:

Fifteen former Iran hostages have censured the Swedish government for “lack of meaningful action” to free Swedish-Iranian doctor Ahmadreza Djalali, who has been on death row in Iran for more than 6 years.

“Sweden has done little to secure his release and also inexcusably failed to provide his family with the level of support and information they need and deserve,” the signatories write in a letter dated 25 April, the eve of Djalali’s eighth year in prison.

Djalali was arrested in April 2016, visiting Iran on an academic trip at the invitation of the University of Tehran and Shiraz University. He was charged with espionage and collaboration with Israel two weeks after his arrest –a charge leveled at many, often with little or no real evidence. In October 2017, he was sentenced to death.

“As former hostages who endured the harrowing ordeal of prolonged unlawful detention in Iran,” the letter reads, “we write to express our deep concern over the ongoing lack of meaningful action taken by your government to secure the release of Ahmadreza Djalali, a Swedish physician on death row in the notorious Evin Prison.”

The signatories include Barry Rosen, who was taken hostage in Iran in 1979, when young supporters of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini stormed the US embassy in Tehran, and Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who spent six years in arbitrary detention in Iran, before reuniting with his family in the UK in 2022. Also on the signatories list is Siamak Namazi, Morad Tahbaz and Emad Sharghi, three of five US citizens released in 2023, as part of a deal brokered by the Biden administration, in which the US released 5 Iranian prisoners and paid $6 billion to the Iranian government.

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