One Danish national and two Austrians were reported to be back in their home countries on Saturday after having been released by the Iranian regime. The Austrians, Kamran Ghaderi and Massud Mossaheb, had been arrested in 2016 and 2019, respectively, while Thomas Kjems was arrested in November 2022, around the peak of the nationwide uprising that was sparked in September by the death of a 22-year-old Kurdish woman at the hands of the “morality police.”
Tehran has made concerted efforts to blame that uprising upon foreign infiltration, and toward that end, over the past nine months it has announced several new arrests of individuals with supposed connections to “enemy” nations in the West. It remains unclear how many such arrests have been carried out in total and how many of them involved people who actually hold citizenship in the countries in question. But even before the uprising began, more than a dozen Western nationals were understood to be held hostage in Iran.
Many reports to that effect also emphasized that the real number was likely to be significantly higher, both because of the opacity of the Iranian criminal justice system and because the families of some arrestees have been known to remain mum about their situations for fear of the public attention to the case would stoke resentment in Iranian authorities and create more complications. These issues were underscored by the news of the three latest releases, insofar as Ghaderi, Mossaheb, and Kjems have rarely if even been included in lists of Western nationals whose release was being pursued by their respective governments.
Now that international attention has been brought to their resolved cases, it appears that efforts to secure their release were being made not only by Austria and Denmark but also by Belgium. Reports indicate that their release was a previously undisclosed condition of Brussels’ release of an Iranian diplomat-cum-terrorist, Assadollah Assadi, who has been serving a 20-year-sentence over his leadership role in a plot to bomb the 2018 Free Iran World Summit, an event organized outside Paris by the National Council of Resistance of Iran.
It is still unclear whether this is the full extent of the prisoner swap agreement. While Assadi’s particularly high value to the Iranian regime might have unilaterally opened up the possibility for the release of multiple hostages in exchange, there is also ample historical precedent for an arrangement to be unbalanced in Iran’s favor. In 2016, for instance, as Iran and six world powers were implementing a nuclear deal, the US arranged to release seven Iranian prisoners and drop charges for fourteen others in exchange for just four Americans whom Iran had detained based on clearly fabricated charges.
This is to say that the possibility still exists that other Iranian prisoners have been released or will be released as part of the arrangement involving Assadi. Even if this is not the case, though, controversy will continue to follow the case, with the NCRI asserting that Belgium violated a court order allowing for the victims of a convicted criminal to mount a legal challenge before he becomes the beneficiary of any swap agreement.
The NCRI and other critics have also argued that by releasing Iranian hostages or offering other concessions to the regime, Western powers risk incentivizing further hostage-taking, among other malign activities.
