Iranian gets life in prison in Sweden for 1980s crimes

STOCKHOLM — An Iranian citizen was sentenced Thursday to life imprisonment by a Swedish court after being convicted of committing grave war crimes and murder during the final phase of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. The court said 61-year-old Noury participated “in the executions of many political prisoners in Iran in the summer of 1988.” The acts were deemed as a serious crime against international law, the court said. A second wave of executions was directed at left-wing sympathizers who were deemed to have renounced their Islamic faith, the court statement said, adding “these acts have been deemed as murder.” They said Iran’s supreme leader at the time, Ayatollah Khomeini, had issued an execution order for all prisoners in the country who sympathized and remained loyal with the Iranian opposition group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, known as MEK. An online platform MizanPlus that belongs to Iran’s judiciary news agency quoted Noury’s son Majid as saying, “The Swedish court was not judicial at all, it was political.” The official Mizan news agency called the sentence “illegal, unfair and without solid evidence” and described Sweden as a “paradise for terrorists.” In Tehran, foreign ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani strongly condemned the sentence. “For the Islamic Republic of Iran, it is absolutely certain that the case of Mr. Hamid Noury was only an excuse for a political action without any real citations and legal validity,” he said, adding Iran “holds Sweden responsible for the damages caused to bilateral relations.” Iran summoned the Swedish envoy to the country and urged the Swedish government to revoke the court verdict and immediately release Nouri, the state-run IRNA news agency said.