The Swedish-Iranian Habib Chaab has been executed in Iran, the news agency AFP says with reference to Iranian state media. He was accused by Iran of acting as the leader of the separatist group ASMLA – made up of Iran’s Arab minority – and of planning and carrying out bombings against the regime.
The crime he was convicted of is fighting against the Islamic regime, a religious and serious crime that is often punishable by death in the country.
In March, news broke that Iran’s Supreme Court had upheld the death sentence against him. In connection with that, the Swedish Foreign Ministry summoned Iran’s ambassador to protest the verdict.
“The government has requested that the death penalty not be carried out and reminded of the EU’s common position, which condemns all use of the death penalty, wherever it is applied,” wrote the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in a written comment.
Foreign Minister Tobias Billström also commented on the death sentence in March.
“The government has been in continuous contact with representatives of Iran for a long time. In these contacts, we have requested clarity on Habib Chaab’s situation and we have repeated our request to meet him,” Billström wrote in a comment.
Early Saturday morning, the Foreign Ministry could neither confirm nor deny the information about the execution.
Corrupt judiciary
The sentence against Chaab was announced when relations between Sweden and Iran almost collapsed.
In 2019, the Iranian former assistant prosecutor Hamid Noury was arrested by Swedish police at Arlanda. He was sentenced last year to life imprisonment and deportation for serious crimes against international law and murder, for his involvement in the executions of political prisoners in Iran in 1988. The Noury case will be decided in the Court of Appeal this autumn.
But Said Mahmoudi, professor of international law at Stockholm University, said in an interview with TT in the spring that the sentence was not specifically aimed at Sweden, but at the Arab minority in Iran.
Lived several years in exile
He then also said that it mattered less to the outcome whether Chaab was guilty of a crime or not.
– The judiciary in Iran is the most corrupt judiciary in the entire world. It is completely controlled by the political leadership. Accused are assigned lawyers, puppets who do nothing.
Chaab, who lived several years in exile in Sweden, was kidnapped under mysterious circumstances in Turkey the year after Noury was arrested.