(Tehran) Iran said on Sunday that everything was “ready” to carry out a prisoner swap with the United States, which dismissed the statement as “another cruel lie”.
“Over the past few days, we have reached an agreement on a prisoner exchange between Iran and the United States. If all goes well on the American side, I think we will be able to attend in the near future,” Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said in a television interview.
“For us, everything is ready. The US side is working on its final technical preparations,” he added.
US Foreign Ministry spokesman Ned Price dismissed the Iranian statement as “another particularly cruel lie that only adds to the suffering of the families” of the detainees.
“We are working tirelessly to secure the release of the three Americans wrongfully detained in Iran,” he said.
“We won’t stop until they find their loved ones,” he added.
At least three Iranian-Americans are being held in Iran, including businessman Siamak Namazi, who gave an unpublished interview to CNN from his cell in Evin prison in Tehran.
For its part, the Iranian judicial authority had reported in August the detention of “dozens” of Iranian nationals in the United States, including Reza Sarhangpour and Kambiz Attar Kashani, accused of having “diverted the American sanctions” taken against Tehran. .
As the two countries do not maintain diplomatic relations, an agreement on the exchange was “signed and indirectly approved” between the Iranians and the Americans in March 2022, Amir-Abdollahian said, calling it “purely humanitarian “.
In the CNN interview that aired on March 9, Siamak Namazi called on President Joe Biden to “put the freedom of innocent Americans above politics” by promoting their release.
This businessman was arrested in October 2015 and sentenced to ten years in prison for espionage. Sentenced to the same sentence, his father Mohammad Baquer Namazi, 85, was released in 2020 from serving his sentence and was able to leave Iran in October 2022.
Other prisoners include Iranian-American investor Emad Sharqi, sentenced to ten years in prison for espionage according to Iranian media, and Morad Tahbaz, an Iranian-American who also has British nationality, arrested in January 2018 and sentenced to ten years. jail for “conspiring with America”.
At least 16 Western passport holders, including six French, are being held in Iran.
Tehran refuses to recognize dual nationality and announced in January the execution of Iranian-British Alireza Akbari, accused of spying for the United Kingdom, which he had always denied.