Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani, when asked about report, said he was not aware of it. “We understand that there is interest in this matter but in our assessment it would complicate the handling of the case if the ministry were to publicly discuss its actions,” Sweden’s foreign ministry told the Times. Sweden said it would not comment on the case beyond that it was working on the case “intensively”. The European Commission refused to confirm the identity of the detained man or if he worked for EU institutions. After his release, he referred to a Swedish fellow prisoner who became like a brother to him. Hostage diplomacy has shifted into execution diplomacy.”Ī Belgian aid worker, Olivier Vandecasteele, was imprisoned in Tehran for 455 days on espionage charges. “It is not a coincidence that they then started executing foreign nationals. “My view is that the European governments keeping their new hostage cases quiet last year inevitably led to other escalations by Iran,” Mr Ratcliffe said. Her husband Richard told the New York Times, “This arrest in 2022 was a real escalation “It is shocking for me that the Swedish government and the EEAS. She was eventually released in March 2022 after a long-standing disagreement over a British government debt was reached. Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian charity worker, was held in Iran for six years on false charges of espionage. In August the US made a deal with Iran to free five Americans in exchange for $6 billion in withheld Iranian oil revenues and the release of Iranian prisoners. In May, Iran executed a Swedish-Iranian dissident convicted of leading an Arab separatist group which Tehran blames for a several attacks including one on a military parade in 2018 that killed 25 people. He was sentenced to life in prison in July 2022, shortly after Mr Floderus’ arrest, prompting Iran to recall its envoy to Sweden in protest. Relations between Sweden and Iran have been tense since 2019 when Sweden arrested a former Iranian official for his part in the mass execution and torture of political prisoners in the 1980s. He had a successful early career and even featured in advertising campaigns to attract young people to top EU civil service jobs. The detention of Mr Floderus stands out from previous cases as he is an established EU official in the diplomatic corp. “These cases exactly underline the very concerning tendency of Iranians to use EU nationals or Iranian dual nationals as pawns for political reasons.” “We are aware and we have been following very closely the case of a Swedish national detained in Iran,” Peter Stano, the European Commission’s foreign affairs spokesman, said on Monday. In July 2022 Iran released a statement saying it had arrested a Swedish national. Mr Floderus was charged with espionage, which is strenously denied, and has been held in the notorious Evin prison in Tehran ever since. He had previously visited there in an official capacity as part of his work for the EU without any problems before he joined the European External Action Service (EEAS). The 33-year-old Swede, who was employed by the EU’s foreign affairs service, was arrested at Tehran airport on April 17 2022, the New York Times reported on Wednesday.Īccording to the newspaper, the former civil service trainee visited Iran with several Swedish friends on what was described as a private tourist trip. Johan Floderus’s incarceration on spying charges was kept a closely guarded secret by Swedish and EU authorities, for whom he appeared in adverts to entice Swedes to apply for the bloc’s civil service, for more than a year. A European Union official and poster boy of the diplomatic corp has been imprisoned in Iran for more than 500 days in the latest example of Tehran’s “hostage diplomacy” to extract concessions from the West.
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