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Iran has not detailed any conditions under which it would release a Swedish EU diplomat held captive for over 500 days, a senior official said Friday (15 September).
Johan Floderus, 33, was arrested on 17 April 2022 at Tehran’s airport as he was returning home from a trip with friends.
The Swede, who works for the EU diplomatic service, is being held at Tehran’s notorious Evin prison.
“First, they have not put formal charges against him, at least yet,” the EU official said, briefing reporters on condition of anonymity.
“They have not said to us any condition for his release, something that we have been asking from the very beginning, from the first day.”
Iran’s judiciary said on Tuesday that Floderus had “committed crimes” in the country and an investigation into his case was being finalised.
The EU official said they had no explanation as to why Floderus, a Farsi-speaker who had worked on development issues in Iran, was detained.
“We don’t know, we have put that question 1,000 times, we never received a clear answer,” the official said.
The official said securing the release of Floderus — whose detention was kept under wraps until this month — is an “absolute priority”.
Iran has long used detained foreign nationals as bargaining chips to secure the release of its citizens or frozen funds held abroad.
Floderus’s arrest came after an Iranian citizen received a life jail term in Sweden for his role in the Iranian regime’s 1988 mass executions of thousands of opponents.
The push to free the Swede comes at a sensitive time for the EU’s ties with Iran.
Brussels serves as a mediator for stalled efforts aimed at resuscitating the 2015 accord on Iran’s nuclear programme, which the US abandoned under former president Donald Trump.
Signatories Britain, France and Germany announced Thursday they would not lift sanctions on Iran in line with an initial schedule as Tehran has broken its commitments.
The EU official said the bloc would now hold “consultations” with the countries involved in the accord.
The official said he expected meetings on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly next week to give the message that the deal “is alive, secondly its the only way, let’s see how we can back to this framework”.
EU relations with Iran have also been battered by Tehran’s deliveries of weaponry to Russia and a crackdown on protests over the death of Mahsa Amini.
The 27-nation bloc has placed repeated rounds of sanctions on Iran over the supplies and the repression of demonstrators.
But the official conceded that Iran’s moves to bolster its ties with the region, through deals with the likes of Saudi Arabia, made it harder to punish Tehran.
“We have more limits in our policy of isolating Iran. When a substantial part of the international community is on an entirely different business,” the official said.
“We have less tools, capabilities and ability to isolate Iran.”
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