Journalist suspected of spying for Iran held in Swedish crackdown

SWEDISH police have arrested a prominent Iraqi journalist on suspicion of operating as an Iranian spy, the latest in a series of police actions against alleged Iranian plots in Western Europe.

Raghdan al-khazali, a journalist based in Stockholm, is suspected of spying on members of an Ahwazi opposition group which has been repeatedly targeted by Iranian assassins in Europe.

The Ahwazi are an Arab minority from western Iran and one of their main dissident groups, the Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahvaz (ASMLA), has been targeted in a coordinated Iranian killing campaign.

One of the group’s leaders, Ahmad Mola Nissi, was shot dead in the Netherlands in 2017. The Dutch government said earlier this year that Iran had hired local gangsters to carry out the assassination.

Last October, Swedish police arrested a Norwegian man of Iranian descent who they alleged was involved in a plot to murder another ASMLA leader based in Copenhagen.

A Swedish court has now ruled that Mr Khazali should be held in pretrial detention on suspicion of “serious illegal intelligence activities against an individual”.

“All I can say is that he denies what the prosecutor says,” Hanna Lindblom, Mr Khazali’s lawyer, said. “I cannot say anything else because I am under a gag order.”

Mr Khazali was the Stockholm correspondent for the Euro-times, a newspaper which has won readers across Europe since it was launched in Sweden in 2016.

However, he is also alleged to have made repeated visits to a television station in the Netherlands that allegedly has links to ASMLA.

Mr Khazali told ASMLA that he opposed the Iranian regime. But members of the group were alarmed to see a photograph of him in southern Iraq meeting Qais Khazali, the leader of Asa’ib Ahl al-haq, an Iraqi militia with close ties to Iran.

“We asked, ‘How are you able to travel there, when you are against Iran?’ He didn’t have a very convincing answer,” a source said.

Mr Khazali is believed to be a member of the same tribe as the militia leader, which could have guaranteed his safety in the area.

ASMLA campaigns for the Ahwazi to be able to separate from Iran and form an Arab state of their own.

Iranian officials consider the group a terrorist organisation and claim that it has carried out a string of bombing attacks in their country.

‘He denies what the prosecutor says but I cannot say anything else because I am under a gag order’