Swedish citizen faces imminent execution in Iran: UN

GENEVA: The United Nations warned Saturday that an Iranian-Swedish citizen is facing imminent execution in Iran after a Swedish court upheld the conviction of a former Iranian prison official.

“Disturbing news that Dr. Ahmadreza Djalali could be shortly executed on charges of ‘enmity against God’,” the UN human rights office said on X.

Djalali was sentenced to death in 2017 on espionage charges that have been denounced as baseless by Stockholm and his supporters.

Before his arrest in Iran in April 2016, Djalali was a visiting professor in disaster medicine at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, a Belgian research university.

The UN rights office said his execution could take place soon “despite failures to respect fair trial and due process standards”. “Iran must stop this execution.”

Sweden’s foreign ministry said that “the circumstances in which Ahmadreza Djalali had been detained make for a serious threat to his health”. Amnesty International warned Friday that Djalali in particular was “at grave risk of imminent retaliatory execution” after the court this week confirmed Noury’s life sentence for crimes committed during a 1988 purge of dissidents.