IRAN RELEASES SCHOLAR IN PRISONER SWAP
Iran released a BritishAustralian scholar, Kylie Moore-Gilbert, detained since 2018 on spying charges, in a prisoner swap conducted Wednesday for three Iranian men who had been held abroad, Iranian official news media reported.
Iran did not reveal the identities of the three citizens it said had been swapped for Moore-Gilbert nor the identity of the country or countries where they had been held. The semiofficial Fars News Agency described the three as “businessmen.”
State television broadcast footage of what it described as the exchange for Moore-Gilbert, who was shown wearing a gray head scarf and a mask, waiting in a room along with another woman. The three Iranian men, draped in Iran's f lag, were seen walking through the door and greeted with f lowers and leis to chants of praise for the Prophet
Muhammad.
Moore-Gilbert was shown leaving the building via the same door and boarding a minivan with her bags.
Moore-Gilbert was a lecturer in Islamic Studies at the University of Melbourne when she went to Iran in 2018 to attend a conference. Agents of Iran's Revolutionary Guard arrested her at the airport as she was leaving on charges of spying for Israel.
She was serving a 10-year sentence in Iran's notorious
Evin Prison and staged several hunger strikes in opposition to her conviction and had said her mental state was deteriorating with solitary confinement and prolonged detention.
The prisoner exchange announced Wednesday came five months after Iran released an American Navy veteran, Michael R. White, as part of a prisoner exchange.
There are currently at least half a dozen foreign and dual nationals held in Iranian prisons: Iranian-American citizens Siamak Namazi, a businessman, and his father, Baquer Namazi, a former official with UNICEF; Morad Tahbaz, an IranianAmerican environmentalist; Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian charity worker with the Thomson Reuters Foundation; Nahid Taghavi, a German-Iranian architect; and Dr. Ahmad Reza Jalali, a Swedish-Iranian physician and researcher.