Sweden Calls for Halting Execution of Ahmadrezа Jalali
Sweden’s Foreign Minister said that in contact with his Iranian counterpart, he expressed concern about news regarding the execution of Ahmadrez Jalali’s death sentence. Jalali informed his family in a phone call about his transfer to solitary confinement for the execution of his sentence.
Ahmadrez Jalali, a dual-national inmate sentenced to death in Evin Prison, said in a phone call with his family that he is being transferred to solitary confinement for the execution of his death sentence.
Following the release of this news, Ann Linde, Sweden’s Foreign Minister, announced that she raised her concerns in contact with Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s Foreign Minister. In a tweet, she condemned Jalali’s death sentence and wrote that Sweden is working to prevent the execution of this sentence.
Ahmadrez Jalali is currently in one of the solitary confinement cells of the quarantine ward 209 in Evin Prison.
Halleh Moussavian, Jalali’s defense lawyer, in an interview with HRANA, the news agency of the Iranian Human Rights Activists Network, expressed concern about the possibility of executing her client’s death sentence and expressed hope that the efforts of human rights organizations and the Swedish government would not be in vain in preventing the execution of this sentence.
Vida Mehran Nia, Mr. Jalali’s wife, by making public the content of the aforementioned phone call, quoted her husband as saying that this call “may be our last conversation.”
Reports indicate that Mr. Jalali was transferred on Tuesday to the sentence execution unit of the Evin Prosecutor’s Office and subsequently transferred to Evin Prison’s quarantine. In Mr. Jalali’s transfer document, it is written that he will be held in quarantine for up to one week to complete the procedures for executing his death sentence.
Ahmadrez Jalali studied medicine in Iran and worked at the Natural Disasters Center. He migrated to Sweden in 2009 to continue his studies. He later completed his doctorate in crisis medicine at Piemonte Orientale University in Italy and eventually settled in Sweden with his wife and two children.
He went to Iran in April 2016 at the invitation of Tehran University, but was arrested there and transferred to prison. Following accusations of “waging war through espionage for Israel” against this researcher, he was sentenced to death.
Tehran’s prosecutor accused Ahmadrez Jalali of “transferring information related to entirely classified system projects in research, military, defense, and nuclear fields in exchange for receiving sums of money along with Swedish citizenship for himself and his family.”
The death sentence of this dual-national inmate was upheld by the Supreme Court in December 2017.
Ahmadrez Jalali has consistently denied these accusations and said that the confessions obtained from him under severe pressure and are not legally admissible.
Source: DW
