An Iranian suspected of sending thousands of people to their deaths in a mass purge of dissidents in the 1980s has been arrested by Swedish police.
Hamid Nouri, 58, was not named by the Swedish authorities but has been widely identified by Iranian exiles, opposition media, and lawyers and activists who say that they spent years trying to bring him to justice.
He was detained at Stockholm airport on Saturday as he arrived to visit relatives
He is accused of being part of a team of prosecutors in the trials and executions of members of the dissident People’s Mohajedin Organisation of Iran (PMOI), an opposition faction that fought on the side of Iraq in the 1980s Gulf war. As the war came to an end, the regime of the then Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, put thousands of inmates of prisons across Iran to death in a matter of weeks.
The PMOI has always claimed that 30,000 people were hanged, although human rights groups put the estimate at more than 5,000.
Mr Nouri’s arrest was carried out under the principle of universal jurisdiction for crimes against humanity, Kaveh Moussavi, a UK-based lawyer who helped to pursue Mr Nouri and drew up the case against him, said.
He was ordered by a district court in Stockholm to be detained pending formal charges until December 11 at the latest.
Mr Nouri’s lawyer, Lars Hultgren, told journalists in Sweden that Mr Nouri was claiming a case of mistaken identity. But Mr Moussavi said he had shown photographs of the man now arrested to former dissidents who had been incarcerated by him and in at least one case tortured by him.
He had played a voice recording of the man to the mother of one of his victims, who broke down in tears on hearing it. She said she recognised it immediately as the voice of the man who summoned her to prison to pick up her son’s belongings after he was hanged. Other people, he said, had contacted him since Persian-language media posted the passport page of the man arrested.
“I have no doubt that this is Hamid Nouri,” he said. “I have 16 people in the European Union willing to give evidence against him.”
He said that talking to former inmates and their families about Mr Nouri was an “emotionally draining experience”. “Hearing the cries of the survivors, the parents, the children is gut-wrenching,” he said. “I want their cries to be heard.”
North European countries have led the way in arresting and prosecuting alleged perpetrators of human rights abuses abroad.
Sweden and Germany have brought Syrian refugees to trial after becoming aware of abuses they committed while fighting on all sides in the civil war in their home country. Last month Germany charged two Syrian asylum-seekers it suspects of being Assad regime security officers who tortured prisoners. One was recognised on the street by a man who said that he had been one of his victims.
Mr Nouri is accused of being assistant prosecutor in two jails: Evin in Tehran and Gohardasht in the town of Karaj, where mass executions took place. Evin is the country’s most important jail for political prisoners, and Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the British-Iranian dual national aid worker, is being held there accused of spying.
New of the arrest was welcomed by Agnès Callamard, the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings and executions, who is also investigating the murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
She called it an “important first step towards justice for the 1988 massacre”, adding: “This would be the very first time that someone is charged in relation to the events that took place in 1988 in Iran, during which thousands of detainees were killed.”
The Times 14.11.2019
