Judgment in July for Iranian former official in the war criminal trial in Sweden
On Wednesday, a historic trial in Sweden against a former Iranian prison administrator accused of war crimes during a purge of dissent in 1988 ended, with a verdict expected in July.
The trial marked the first time an Iranian official was brought to justice for purges.
Hamid Noury, 61, charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes for his role in the killing of as many as 5,000 prisoners across Iran, is said to have been ordered by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini.
The killings were revenge for attacks carried out by the People’s Mujahedin of Iran (MEK), an exile opposition group, at the end of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War.
Last week, prosecutors demanded a life sentence for Noury, who has been on trial in Stockholm District Court since August 2021.
“It’s ironic, because I witnessed many of my friends being sentenced to death in a one-minute trial in Iran. How different it is here,” Ramadan Fathi, a former prisoner who testified against Noury, told AFP.
On Wednesday, the last day of the trial, the judge set the date for the verdict on July 14.
“I hope these hands will be cleansed … with God’s help,” Noury told the court, palms raised to the sky, holding a Koran.
“Friends, I love you, I’m not mad at you,” he told those present in the courtroom, his statements in Farsi translated into Swedish by a court-appointed interpreter.
The defense had questioned Sweden’s principle of universal jurisdiction – which allows it to try the case regardless of where the crimes took place – and questioned the plaintiffs’ testimony.
“There is a lot of uncertainty about how the name Hamid Noury came about in the testimony,” Daniel Marcus, one of Noury’s two lawyers, told the court, calling the evidence “inadequate.”
According to the prosecutor and the survivors who testified against him, Noury was an assistant to the deputy prosecutor in the Gohardasht prison near Tehran at the time of the events.
He is said to have handed down death sentences, taken prisoners to the execution chamber and helped prosecutors collect the names of prisoners.
Noury has claimed that he was on leave during the period in question and said that he worked in another prison, not the Gohardasht.
Noury was arrested at an airport in Stockholm in November 2019 after Iranian dissidents in Sweden submitted a police report against him.
Throughout the nine-month trial, which briefly moved to Albania to hear some testimonies at the end of 2021, MEK supporters protested loudly outside Stockholm City Hall.
A plaintiff’s lawyer, Kenneth Lewis, said the evidence in the case was “overwhelming”.
The defense “tried to find small, small holes, but in my opinion they were not very comfortable” in their argument.
However, a lawyer representing MEK expressed concern that Noury - who is currently in custody pending sentencing – would flee Sweden if acquitted, before an appeal could be lodged.
Fathi, the former prisoner, meanwhile said he was “very pleased to see with my own eyes” someone from the regime being brought to justice.
“Now that we have reached the end of this trial, I hope that one day very soon the whole leaders of this regime, the perpetrators of this massacre, will be brought to justice here or elsewhere.”
The trial has made Stockholm’s already chilly relations with Tehran even more frosty.
Iran summoned the Swedish ambassador last week, the same day that the prosecutor in Stockholm requested a life sentence against Noury.
According to a statement published on the Iranian Foreign Ministry’s website, the Iranian Foreign Minister also called his Swedish counterpart Ann Linde.
“Iran regards the arrest and trial of an Iranian citizen, Hamid Noury, as illegal and demands his immediate release,” Hossein Amir-Abdollahian was quoted as saying.
Amir-Abdollahian also lamented that a “terrorist group”, referring to the MEK, had taken over the trial through a “fraudulent campaign”.
The Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs has meanwhile advised its citizens not to travel unnecessarily to Iran.
Iran aims to execute Swedish-Iranian academic Ahmadreza Djalali, who was sentenced to death in 2017 for espionage for Israel, before May 21, according to the Iranian news agency Isna.