Terrorist against development workers – Belgium and Iran carried out a prisoner exchange that had been planned for months. Some called for the deal to be stopped.
Belgium has completed a controversial prisoner swap with Iran. After more than a year in prison in Iran, Belgian development worker Olivier Vandecasteele is on his way home, the Belgian Foreign Ministry said on Twitter.
In return, Iranian diplomat Assadollah Assadi, convicted of terrorism charges, was released, Iran’s Foreign Minister Hussein Amirabdollahian announced. Oman mediated the prisoner exchange. His Sultan Haitham bin Tarik is expected in Tehran on Sunday.
Assadi, who was arrested in Germany in 2018, was sentenced to 20 years in prison by a court in Antwerp in 2021 for allegedly planning a bomb attack on a mass demonstration by Iranian exile opposition members in France. To the end, Iran maintained that Assadi was innocent.
Allegations of espionage and cooperation with the USA
According to the Iranian judiciary, the development worker Vandecasteele was sentenced to a total of 40 years in prison and 74 lashes. In particular, he was accused of espionage and cooperation with arch-enemy USA as well as money smuggling.
The case is particularly explosive because, according to the investigation, the 51-year-old Assadi is an employee of the Iranian secret service, whose tasks include monitoring and combating opposition groups inside and outside Iran. It is therefore considered possible that the attack plans in France were based on a direct government order.
The opposition group NCRI, which is banned in Iran, also supports this thesis. The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) organized the mass rally on June 30, 2018 in Villepinte near Paris. Numerous Western supporters also took part in it, including the lawyer for then US President Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani. The group is controversial in the Iranian diaspora. Some voices called for the deal to be scrapped.
Arrest was carried out in Bavaria
The Iranian government had already protested against the arrest of Assadi in Germany because the man was accredited as a diplomat at the Iranian embassy in Vienna at the time of the crime. On July 1, 2018, he was arrested at a motorway service station near Aschaffenburg in Bavaria and then handed over by Germany to Belgium.
The German judiciary argued that the man was not under diplomatic protection when he was arrested because he was on a holiday trip outside of Austria. The federal prosecutor’s office had obtained an arrest warrant against Assadi, among other things, because of his activities as a secret service agent and conspiracy to murder.
Critics accuse Iran of detaining foreigners in order to have a bargaining chip. According to the Iranian government, talks about a prisoner swap with the United States are currently on the table again. In 2016, Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian was released along with three other US citizens. In return, the US pardoned seven Iranians accused of violating US sanctions.
Source: Stern
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