Iranian Foreign Minister Hosein Amirabdolahian has held a telephone conversation with his Swedish counterpart Tobias Billström, to whom he demanded the release of Hamid Nuri, an Iranian citizen sentenced to life imprisonment for the mass executions and torture of opponents in 1988 in a prison in the city of Karaj.
Amirabdolahian has warned in the call of «consequences» in bilateral relations for the «illegal detention» of Nuri, according to the official Iranian news agency IRNA.
The head of Iranian diplomacy criticized the «politicization» of Nuri’s case and linked it to the People’s Mujahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI), an exiled party and armed organization.
«In recent years some issues have affected relations between the two countries mainly as a result of the actions of a third actor,» Amirabdolahian has indicated.
Nuri was arrested in the European country in November 2019, after which a trial was opened against him in 2021 for his role in the killing of thousands of people.
The executions were carried out following a secret edict issued by the then-great leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, after an armed incursion into Iran by the PMOI, an Iraq-based opposition group outlawed by Iranian authorities, according to the report published by Amnesty in 2018.
Khomeini’s order came in the final stages of the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988), in which the PMOI, which actively participated in the revolution that overthrew Shah Reza Pahlevi with an Islamist discourse mixed with an adaptation of Marxist ideology, fought on the side of Saddam Hussein’s regime after denouncing the actions of the religious leadership installed by the ayatollahs.
The group was persecuted by the religious authorities in Iran, which led the then leader of the group, Masud Rajavi, to reach a pact with Hussein in 1986 in the middle of the war between the two, which led Iran’s supreme leader to order the execution of alleged members and sympathizers of the organization.
