صراط عشق صراط عشق
The United States and Iran on Monday carried out a prisoner swap agreement that included freeing five Iranians who were unjustly detained in the United States.
Two of the Iranians in the swap were identified as Mehrdad Moein Ansari and Reza Sarhangpour who had arrived in the Qatari capital and were heading home.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Nasser Kanaani told reporters in Tehran that two other Iranian prisoners would stay in the U.S. at their own request and the fifth would join his family in a third country.
“After a successful team effort, five innocent Iranian compatriots in American prisons will be free today and two of them will enter Tehran via Doha,” Gharibabadi wrote on his X account.
“The High Council for Human Rights, alongside the government and the judiciary, will remain determined to uphold the rights of Iranians abroad,” he added.
The other Iranians charged with nonviolent crimes in the United States were Kaveh Lotfolah Afrasiabi, Amin Hasanzadeh and Kambiz Attar Kashani.
Afrasiabi and Hasanzadeh are permanent U.S. residents, while Kashani is an Iranian national.
Ansari and Kashani were serving federal prison sentences, while Afrasiabi, Hasanzadeh and Sarhangpour were on supervised pre-trial release.
The prisoner swap between Iran and the U.S. was brokered by Qatar. It followed two years of indirect negotiations between Tehran and Washington.
The Islamic Republic has emphasized that the exchange of prisoners is a completely humanitarian issue.
The Iranians had been held in American jails illegally and under the pretext of violating U.S. sanctions on the Islamic Republic.
Biden Administration officials said despite the prisoner swap, the United States is issuing new sanctions on Iran. Those sanctioned include Iran’s intelligence ministry and former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The officials still said the door for diplomacy over Iran’s nuclear program was not entirely shut.
“If we see an opportunity, we will
explore it but right now, I’ve really nothing to talk about,” a senior administration official was quoted as saying.
Three of the Americans in the swap were identified as Siamak Namazi, Emad Shargi and Morad Tahbaz, who along with the other two Americans were under house arrest pending the transfer.
“I am grateful to our partners at home and abroad for their tireless efforts to help us achieve this outcome, including the Governments of Qatar, Oman, Switzerland, and
South Korea,” President Joe Biden said in a statement.
Senior Biden administration officials told reporters the logistics of the swap involved a Qatari plane traveling from Iran to Doha carrying the five freed Americans.
Meanwhile, Central Bank of Iran Governor Muhammad Reza Farzin confirmed that the U.S. had to allow South Korea to release Iranian funds totaling some $6 billion and that the assets have now been transferred to Qatari banks.
The $6 billion had been held in South Korea, one of Iran’s largest oil customers, as a result of a waiver issued by the Trump administration in 2018 that permitted Seoul to continue purchasing Iran’s oil. Those funds became stuck in 2019 when the Trump administration tightened sanctions on Iran.
Over the last week, in preparation for the deal to be finalized, those funds were converted from Korean currency to euros before being moved to accounts in Qatar.
Farzin said the funds had been deposited into the accounts of six Iranian banks in Qatar’s Al Ahli and Al Dukhan banks.
The six Iranian banks namely Keshavarzi, Saman, Pasargad, Tourism, Karafarin and Shahr opened accounts in Qatar after the country’s funds in two South Korean banks in Seoul were transferred on August 10 to the account of Swiss National Bank (SNB) for conversion into euros.
“We received an official letter from the Qatari authorities yesterday, according to which the accounts of Iranian banks had been activated, and today, 5.573 billion and 492,000 euros have been deposited into the accounts of six Iranian banks at two banks, Al Ahli and Al Dukhan,” the chief banker said.
Farzin underlined that the released funds are viewed as the foreign currency reserves of the Central Bank of Iran that will be spent in accordance with national interests and to strengthen the rial.
He said access to Iran’s foreign exchange resources is being pursued in several other countries and the results will be announced when finalized.
In New York, on the sidelines of the UN general assembly, Raisi’s aides say that Iran will push the U.S. to see if the prisoner swap can lead to wider de-escalation in the region.
The obvious place to start would be Yemen. Yemen’s Ansrallah delegation was in Riyadh last week for unprecedented peace talks. But Biden would also like to see an elusive normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and the occupying regime of Israel, something the U.S. president will discuss with the Zionist prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, when they meet in New York.
