Leader of the far-right party the Sweden Democrats Jimmy Akesson delivers a speech after Sunday’s general election in Stockholm, Sweden on September 13, 2026.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

FILE PHOTO: Hamid Noury, who is accused of involvement in the massacre of political prisoners in Iran in 1988, sits with attorney Thomas Soderqvist, during his trial, in this courtroom sketch, in Stockholm District Court, Sweden November 23, 2021.
| Photo Credit: VIA REUTERS

Iran and Sweden on Saturday carried out a prisoner swap that involves the release of Hamid Nouri, convicted of war crimes by Sweden over 1988 mass executions in the Islamic Republic, in exchange for a European Union diplomat and another man held by Tehran.

Iran released Johan Floderus, a Swede who had been working for the EU’s diplomatic corps, as well as a man identified as Saeed Azizi by Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson.

They “are now on a plane home to Sweden, and will soon be reunited with their families,” Kristersson wrote on the social platform X.

Oman mediated the swap, the state-run Oman News Agency reported. Iranian state television reported Nouri was already freed and would be heading back to Tehran.

In 2022, the Stockholm District Court sentenced Nouri to life in prison over his role in the executions. It identified him as an assistant to the deputy prosecutor at the Gohardasht prison outside the Iranian city of Karaj.

The 1988 mass executions came at the end of Iran’s long war with Iraq. After Iran’s then-Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini accepted a United Nations-brokered cease-fire, members of the Iranian opposition group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, heavily armed by Saddam Hussein, stormed across the Iranian border in a surprise attack.

Iran ultimately blunted their assault, but the attack set the stage for the sham retrials of political prisoners, militants and others that would become known as “death commissions.”

International rights groups estimate that as many as 5,000 people were executed. Iran has never fully acknowledged the executions, apparently carried out on Khomeini’s orders, though some argue that other top officials were effectively in charge in the months before his 1989 death.

Late Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, killed in a helicopter crash in May, also was involved in the mass executions.

Floderus’ family said he was arrested in April 2022 at the Tehran airport while returning from a vacation with friends. His detention represented yet another case of Tehran using foreigners or those with dual nationalities as pawns in negotiations with the West.

Azizi’s case was not as prominent as Floderus’. In February, the group Human Rights Activists in Iran reported that the dual Iranian-Swedish national had been sentenced to five years in prison by Tehran’s Revolutionary Court on charges of “assembly and collusion against national security.” The group said Azizi has cancer.

Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson. File
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said on Monday he was open to allowing nuclear weapons on Swedish soil in wartime, as critics call for the new NATO member to ban their deployment.

Sweden’s parliament is set to vote on a Defence Cooperation Agreement (DCA) with the United States in June which will give the U.S. access to military bases in Sweden and allow the storage of military equipment and weapons in the Scandinavian country.

Sweden abandoned two centuries of military non-alignment to join NATO in March this year.

Calls have mounted in recent weeks, from the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Association among others, for the government to put in writing in the DCA agreement that Sweden will not allow nuclear weapons on its soil.

The government has repeatedly insisted there is no need to have a ban spelled out, citing “broad consensus on nuclear weapons” in Sweden as well as a parliamentary decision that bars nuclear weapons in Sweden in peacetime.

But Mr. Kristersson said on Monday that wartime was a different story.

“In a war situation it’s a completely different matter, (it) would depend entirely on what would happen,” he told public broadcaster Swedish Radio.

“In the absolute worst-case scenario, the democratic countries in our part of the world must ultimately be able to defend themselves against countries that could threaten us with nuclear weapons.”

He insisted that any such decision to place nuclear weapons in Sweden would be taken by Sweden, not the United States.

“Sweden decides over Swedish territory,” he said.

But, he stressed, “the whole purpose of our NATO membership and our defence is to ensure that that situation does not arise.”

If Ukraine had been a NATO member, “it would not have been attacked by Russia,” he said.

Sweden’s Social Democratic Party, which was in power when Sweden submitted its NATO membership application in May 2022, said at the time it would work to express “unilateral reservations against the deployment of nuclear weapons and permanent bases on Swedish territory”.

Nordic neighbours Denmark and Norway, which are already NATO members, have both refused to allow foreign countries to establish permanent military bases or nuclear weapons on their soil in peacetime.