Swedish-Iranian doctor ‘to be executed by May 21’

A Swedish-Iranian doctor accused of spying for Mossad will be executed within weeks, Tehran said yesterday.

Dr Ahmadreza Djalali, 50, will be put to death by May 21, Isna state-run news agency reported.

Dr Djalali, an expert in disaster medicine, was detained during a visit to Iran in April 2016 and sentenced to death 18 months later.

He was found guilty of sharing with the Israeli spy agency information about two Iranian nuclear scientists who were assassinated in 2010.

Dr Djalali, who worked at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, has said he is being punished for refusing to spy for Iran while working in Europe.

He was granted Swedish citizenship in February 2018 while in prison, in an unsuccessful bid to persuade Iran to commute his sentence. In 2017, Iranian state television ran a report in which Dr Djalali appeared to confess to having relayed information about the scientists to a foreign intelligence service.

The broadcast carried images of a Swedish ID card and of Rome’s Colosseum, AFP news agency reported.

A voice purported to be that of Dr Djalali said that before he left his homeland he had worked for the Iranian Defence Ministry.

The voiceover said this may have been why his recruiters, officers from Israel’s Mossad posing as Europeans, had sought him out.

In the past few years, numerous Iranians who hold foreign passports have been detained while visiting Iran and accused of being spies.

Some had spent most of their lives abroad.

Tehran has been accused of taking foreign citizens’ prisoner on baseless charges to use them as leverage in foreign policy negotiations.

Before Dr Djalali’s death sentence was announced, Sweden’s Foreign Ministry advised its citizens to avoid non-essential travel to Iran “due to the security situation”.

On Monday, Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it was summoning Sweden’s ambassador to condemn the trial of an Iranian former official.

Hamid Nouri, 61, has been on trial in Stockholm since last August. He was arrested in 2019 and stands accused of being involved in a wave of mass killings in 1988, at the end of the Iran-Iraq war.

Rights groups say as many as 30,000 people were killed, although estimates of the final death toll vary significantly.

Many of those killed were hanged from cranes, a common method of execution by the regime in Tehran.

Victims included members of the Mujahideen e-Khalq, a resistance group that sided with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein during the war, as well as supporters of other opposition groups.

Many were allegedly killed after being detained on unexplained charges and being tortured during interrogation.

Mr Nouri is being charged under the principle of universal jurisdiction, which allows Swedish courts to handle serious cases such as war crimes regardless of where the offences were committed.

Dr Djalali, who worked in Stockholm, has said he is being punished for refusing to spy for Iran while working in Europe