Iran FM slams detention, trial of Hamid Nouri as illegal, demands his immediate release

Iran's Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian has demanded the immediate release of Hamid Nouri, a former Iranian official who has been incarcerated in Sweden since 2019, saying Tehran regards his detention and trial as “illegal.”

“The Islamic Republic of Iran considers the detention and trial of Hamid Nouri, an Iranian citizen, illegal and demands his immediate release,” Amir-Abdollahian said in a phone conversation with his Swedish counterpart Ann Linde on Wednesday.

Nouri was arrested upon arrival in Sweden at Stockholm Airport in November 2019 and was immediately imprisoned. He has been held in solitary confinement for over two years.

“My husband traveled to Sweden with an invitation and as he was disembarking from the plane he was brutally detained and insulted by several police officers in front of a crowd of Iranians and others and taken into custody,” Nouri’s wife told Press TV.

Meanwhile, Swedish prosecutors have requested the maximum penalty of life imprisonment for Nouri, accusing the former Iranian judiciary official of prisoner abuse in 1988.

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The wife of a former Iranian official illegally arrested and imprisoned in Sweden back in 2019 has complained that her husband was detained with no declared reason or evidence and placed in solitary confinement for over 30 months.

The charges against Nouri stem from accusations leveled against him by members of the anti-Iran terrorist Mujahedin-e-Khalq Organization (MKO), who claim that Nouri was involved in the execution and torture of MKO members in 1988. Nouri vehemently rejects the allegations.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry summoned the Swedish ambassador to Tehran on Sunday to protest Nouri’s continued imprisonment, which it described as “totally illegal” and driven by “false allegations made by the MKO terrorist organization and the hostile smear campaign against the Islamic Republic.”

“It is a source of regret that a terrorist group, whose crimes against the people of Iran and even Iraq during the [former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s] Ba’athist regime are clearly evident, has taken over this sham process in Sweden,” Amir-Abdollahian said.

The MKO has conducted numerous assassinations and bombings against Iranian statesmen and civilians since the 1979 victory of Iran’s Islamic Revolution. Its members fled Iran in 1986 to Iraq, where they enjoyed backing from Saddam Hussein.

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Out of the nearly 17,000 Iranians killed in terrorist assaults since the Islamic Revolution, about 12,000 have fallen victim to the MKO’s acts of terror.

The anti-Iran cult was on the US government’s list of terrorist organizations until 2012. Major European countries, including France, have also removed it from their blacklists.

A few years ago, MKO elements were relocated from Camp Ashraf in Iraq’s Diyala Province to Camp Hurriyet (Camp Liberty), a former US military base in Baghdad, and later sent to Albania.

MKO terrorists enjoy freedom of activity in the US and Europe and even hold regular meetings, in which European and American officials make speeches.

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