DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Iran and Sweden carried out a prisoner swap Saturday in which Tehran freed a European Union diplomat and another man for an Iranian convicted in Stockholm of committing war crimes for his part in the mass shooting. 1988 executions in the Islamic Republic. .

The arrest of Hamid Nouri by Sweden in 2019 while he was traveling there as a tourist likely led to the detention of the two Swedes, part of a long-running strategy by Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution to use people with ties abroad as a key in the negotiations with Sweden. the West.

While Iranian state television claimed without evidence that Nouri was being “illegally detained”, Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson described the detentions of diplomat Johan Floderus and Saeed Azizi as a “hell on earth” faced by the two men.

“Iran has turned these Swedes into pawns in a cynical bargaining game aimed at freeing Iranian citizen Hamid Nouri from Sweden,” Kristersson said. “It was clear all along that this operation would require difficult decisions now that the government has made those decisions.”

Oman, a sultanate on the eastern edge of the Arabian Peninsula, brokered the release, the state news agency reported. Oman has long served as an interlocutor between Iran and the West.

In 2022, the Stockholm District Court sentenced Nouri to life in prison for his role in the executions. It identified him as an assistant to the deputy prosecutor at Gohardasht prison outside the Iranian city of Karaj.

The 1988 mass executions came at the end of Iran’s long war with Iraq. After then-Iranian leader Ruhollah Khomeini accepted a United Nations-brokered ceasefire, members of the Iranian opposition group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, heavily armed by Saddam Hussein, stormed across the Iranian border in a surprise attack.

Iran eventually blunted their attack, but the attack paved the way for mock retrials of political prisoners, militants and others, which would become known as “death commissions.”

International rights groups estimate that as many as 5,000 people have been executed. Iran has never fully recognized the executions, which were apparently carried out on Khomeini’s orders, although some say other top officials were actually in charge in the months before his death in 1989.

The late Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash in May, was also involved in the mass executions.

Floderus’ family said he was arrested at Tehran airport in April 2022 while returning from a holiday with friends. Floderus had been in custody for months before his family and others made his detention public.

Azizi’s case was not as prominent as Floderus’s. In February, the group Human Rights Activists in Iran reported that the dual Iranian-Swedish citizen had been sentenced to five years in prison by Tehran’s Revolutionary Court on charges of “conspiracy and conspiracy against national security.” The group said Azizi has cancer.

The EU’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, praised the release of the two men.

“Other EU citizens continue to be arbitrarily detained in Iran,” he wrote on the social platform X. “We will continue to work together with other EU states for their freedom.

Iran has long maintained that it does not hold prisoners for use in negotiations, despite years and multiple exchanges with the US and other countries showing otherwise.

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Associated Press writers Amir Vahdat in Tehran, Iran, and Jari Tanner in Helsinki contributed to this report.

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