Sweden warns citizens to travel to Iran in a dispute over the war criminal trial
The Iranian Foreign Ministry is calling on Sweden’s ambassador to condemn the trial of a former Iranian official accused of being involved in thousands of extrajudicial executions during the 1980s.
Hamid Noury, 61, has been on trial in Stockholm since August last year. He was arrested in 2019 and accused of being involved in a wave of massacres in 1988, at the end of the bloody war between Iran and Iraq.
Rights groups say as many as 30,000 people were killed, although estimates of the final death toll vary widely.
Many of those killed were hung by cranes, a common method of execution by the Tehran regime. Among the victims were members of the Mujahideen e-Khalq, a resistance group that sided with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein during the war, as well as other opposition groups.
Many are said to have been killed after being detained on unexplained charges and tortured during interrogation.
Swedish Ambassador Mattias Lentz was called after a trial on Thursday when prosecutors demanded the maximum sentence of life imprisonment for Noury.
In a Twitter post, Sweden’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs advised its citizens against unnecessary trips to Iran “due to the security situation”.
Tehran has been accused of capturing foreign nationals on baseless charges of using them as leverage in foreign policy negotiations.
Mr. Noury is prosecuted according to the principle of universal jurisdiction, which allows Swedish courts to handle serious cases such as war crimes regardless of where the crimes were committed.
Updated: May 2, 2022, 3:41 p.m.