Iran’s official IRNA news agency quoted the Iranian Judiciary’s public relations department on Monday as saying that Hamid Nouri has not been allowed to call his family for the past 20 days, increasing his family members’ concerns about his health condition.
Nouri was arrested upon arrival in Sweden at Stockholm Airport in November 2019 and was immediately imprisoned. He has been held in solitary confinement for over two years.
According to the latest reports, the judicial officials in Sweden have changed his cell, but his conditions have not improved and he is still kept in a solitary cell despite grave concerns about his health.
His family say that despite all their efforts to contact Nouri during the past 20 days, Sweden’s judicial officials have not allowed any contact with him.
Earlier in May, Nouri’s wife told Press TV, “My husband traveled to Sweden with an invitation and as he was disembarking from the plane he was brutally detained and insulted by several police officers in front of a crowd of Iranians and others and taken into custody.”
Swedish prosecutors have requested the maximum penalty of life imprisonment for Nouri, accusing the former Iranian judiciary official of prisoner abuse in 1988.
The charges against Nouri stem from accusations leveled against him by members of the anti-Iran terrorist Mujahedin-e-Khalq Organization (MKO), who claim that Nouri was involved in the execution and torture of MKO members in 1988. Nouri vehemently rejects the allegations.
On May 4, Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian called his Swedish counterpart Ann Linde, demanding the immediate release of Nouri, stating Tehran regards his detention and trial as “illegal.”
Iran’s Foreign Ministry has also summoned the Swedish ambassador to Tehran, condemning Nouri’s continued imprisonment as “totally illegal” and driven by “false allegations made by the MKO terrorist organization and the hostile smear campaign against the Islamic Republic.”
The MKO has conducted numerous assassinations and bombings against Iranian statesmen and civilians since the 1979 victory of Iran’s Islamic Revolution. Its members fled Iran in 1986 to Iraq, where they enjoyed backing from Saddam Hussein.
Out of the nearly 17,000 Iranians killed in terrorist assaults since the Islamic Revolution, about 12,000 have fallen victim to the MKO’s acts of terror.
The anti-Iran cult was on the US government’s list of terrorist organizations until 2012. Major European countries, including France, have also removed it from their blacklists.
MKO terrorists enjoy freedom of activity in the US and Europe and even hold regular meetings, in which European and American officials make speeches.
