Iran says it’s reviewing request to delay Swedish doctor’s execution

Iran says it’s reviewing request to delay Swedish doctor’s execution

Washington Post-May 19th 2022

Iran this week said it was reviewing a request to delay the execution of an Iranian-born Swedish academic convicted of espionage.

The case of Ahmadreza Jalali, a disaster medicine doctor, has drawn widespread international condemnation and put a spotlight on Iran’s pattern of arresting dual nationals on spurious charges, often for political leverage.

Jalali’s death sentence is “final,” a spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry said Monday, adding that the judiciary was considering an appeal by his lawyers to delay the execution scheduled for May 21.

Iranian authorities arrested Jalali, 50, when he traveled to Tehran for a conference in 2016. Officials accused him of spying for Israel’s Mossad, including leaking details that led to the killings of two Iranian nuclear scientists in 2010.

A judge then sentenced him to death following what his lawyers said was a forced confession. A panel of U.N. experts said in March that Jalali has been subjected to “severe physical and psychological ill-treatment” in prison that amounted to torture.

On Tuesday, a spokesperson for the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights issued a statement urging Iran to halt the execution and revoke his death sentence, which the agency called “an arbitrary deprivation of life.”

“It’s a nightmare,” Jalali’s wife, Vida Mehrannia, told the Associated Press last week from Stockholm, where she lives with their two children.

“For the politics of other countries, we are suffering,” she said.

The news comes during heightened tensions between Iran and Sweden over Stockholm’s decision to arrest and prosecute an Iranian official for murder and war crimes.

Swedish authorities apprehended former judicial official Hamid Nouri in Stockholm in 2019 and charged him over his alleged role in the mass execution of dissidents in Iran in 1988.