Iran’s judiciary on Tuesday dismissed the possibility of a prisoner swap with Sweden that would see a former Iranian official on trial for war crimes in Stockholm released in exchange for a Swedish-Iranian academic on death row.
The two cases “have nothing to do with each other... as a result, there is no question of an exchange,” the spokesman for the judiciary, Zabihollah Khodayian, told a press conference in Tehran.
The remarks come as former prison official Hamid Noury, 61, is set to be sentenced in July in a trial in Sweden.
He was arrested in November 2019 and faces charges including crimes against humanity and war crimes for his role in the killing of as many as 5,000 prisoners across Iran in 1988 during the Iran-Iraq war.
Last week, Iranian media reported that Swedish-Iranian academic Ahmadreza Djalali would be executed by May 21, after he was sentenced to death in 2017 over espionage for Israel.
