Iran and Sweden carried out a prisoner swap on Saturday in which Tehran released a European Union diplomat and another person in exchange of an Iranian convicted in Stockholm of war crimes for his involvement in the 1988 mass executions in the Islamic Republic.
Nuri was arrested in Sweden in 2019 while visiting the Scandinavian country as a tourist. His detention led to the arrest of the two Swedes.
While Iranian state television claimed without evidence that Nouri had been “illegally detained”, Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristerson said diplomat Johan Floderus and a second Swedish citizen, Saeed Azizi, were facing "hell on earth".
“Iran has turned these Swedes into pawns in a cynical game of negotiations in order to get Iranian citizen Hamid Nouri released from Sweden. It has been clear all along that this operation will require difficult decisions; now the government has made these decisions,", Christerson said.
State television broadcast images of Nouri limping off a plane at Tehran's Mehrabad International Airport and being hugged by his family.
“I am Hamid Nouri. I'm in Iran,” he said. “God makes me free".
Oman - a sultanate on the eastern edge of the Arabian Peninsula, mediated the release, the country's state news agency announced. Oman has long served as an interlocutor between Iran and the West. The exchange comes as the Muslim world celebrates Eid al-Adha, which marks the end of the Hajj pilgrimage and usually frees prisoners.
In 2022, the Stockholm District Court sentenced Nuri to life in prison.
The mass executions of 1988 were a result of Iran's long war with Iraq. After Iran's then-supreme leader Ruhollah Khomeini accepted a UN-brokered ceasefire, members of the Iranian opposition group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, heavily armed by Saddam Hussein, swooped across the Iranian border in a surprise attack.
Iran eventually blunted their attack, but the attack set the stage for sham retrials of political prisoners, militants and others.
International human rights groups estimate that around 5,000 people were executed. Iran has never fully acknowledged the executions, apparently on Khomeini's orders, although some claim that other high-ranking officials were effectively directed in the months before his death in 1989.
The late Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash in May, was also implicated in the mass executions.
The EU's top diplomat, Josep Borrell, welcomed the release of the two men. “Other EU citizens are still being arbitrarily detained in Iran,” he wrote on the social platform X. “We will continue to work for their freedom together” with other EU countries.
Late on Saturday night, Azizi and Floderus landed in Stockholm and were met by Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristerson.
Addressing journalists in Stockholm, Kristerson confirmed that the men were “free and back on Swedish soil”.
“It has been a long period of suffering that is now over for Johan and Said, of course, but I think just as much about those who were waiting for them here at home,” he said.
Iran has long maintained that it does not hold prisoners to use in negotiations, despite years of multiple exchanges with the US and other nations indicating otherwise.