STOCKHOLM – Sweden’s foreign minister says a report that Iran plans to execute a Swedish-Iranian doctor convicted of espionage this month is “extremely worrying”.
Sources told Iran’s semi-official Isna news agency that Ahmadreza Djalali, 50, would be put to death by May 21.
Foreign Minister Ann Linde tweeted that Sweden and the EU condemned the death penalty and demanded Djalali’s release.
The emergency medicine specialist was arrested during a business trip in 2016 and accused of spying for Israel.
He was sentenced to death by a Revolutionary Court in Tehran the following year, after what human rights groups called a grossly unfair trial.
Djalali said he had been forced to “confess” while being subjected to torture and other ill-treatment, including threats to kill or otherwise harm his children, who live in Sweden with his wife.
He also alleged that he had been prosecuted solely because of his refusal to use his academic ties in European institutions to spy for Iran.
In November 2020, Djalali was informed by authorities at Tehran’s Evin prison that his death sentence was about to be carried out. He spent five months in solitary confinement, awaiting execution, before being returned to a cell with other inmates.
On Wednesday, Isna reported that it had “heard from informed sources” that Djalali would be executed “by the end of the [Persian] month of Ordibehesht [21 May] at the latest”.
The Iranian judiciary did not immediately comment on the story, which was also not picked up by state media. (BBC)
