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alarabiya – Sweden’s Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said on Monday the Nordic country demanded that Iran immediately release Swedish EU employee Johan Floderus from prison.
Kristersson told a news conference Floderus, who was arrested in Iran 2022, was arbitrarily detained.
Iranian authorities have accused Floderus, held in a Tehran prison for more than 600 days, of conspiring with Iran’s arch-enemy Israel to harm the Islamic Republic, the Iranian judiciary said Sunday.
“Johan Floderus is accused of extensive measures against the security of the country, extensive intelligence cooperation with the Zionist regime and corruption on earth,” the judiciary’s Mizan Online news agency said.
Corruption on earth is one of Iran’s most serious offences which carries a maximum penalty of death.
“The defendant has been active against the Islamic Republic of Iran in the field of gathering information for the benefit of the Zionist regime in the form of subversive projects,” Mizan quoted the prosecution as saying.
Floderus, 33, works for the European Union diplomatic service. He was arrested on April 17, 2022, at Tehran airport as he was returning from a trip abroad, and is being held in Tehran’s Evin prison.
Relations between Sweden and Iran have been tense since 2019, when Sweden arrested a former Iranian official, Hamid Noury, on suspicion of torture and executions of political prisoners in Iran in the 1980s.
A Swedish district court in 2022 found Noury guilty of the charges. Noury appealed the case, and an appeals court ruling is expected next week.
(With agencies)
