Iran will free detainees with Western ties in Iran in return for billions of dollars from the US and the United Kingdom, state TV announced Sunday. The U.S. quickly denied the report, while the U.K. didn’t react.
The state television report cited an anonymous official, just as Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei started giving what authorities before depicted as an “significant” discourse. Nonetheless, Khamenei didn’t promptly talk about any proposed swap in the midst of negotiations in Vienna over Tehran’s worn out nuclear deal with world powers.
The authority cited by Iranian state television said a deal made between the U.S. and Tehran included a prisoner swap in return for the sum of $7 billion in frozen Iranian assets.
“The Americans agreed to pay $7 billion and swap four Iranians who were dynamic in bypassing sanctions for four American government operatives who have carried out part of their punishments,” state television said, citing the authority in an on-screen slither.
U.S. State Office representative Ned Price promptly denied the Iranian state television report.
“Reports that a prisoner swap bargain has been reached are false,” Price said. “As we have said, we generally raise the instances of Americans confined or missing in Iran. We won’t stop until we can rejoin them with their families.”
Price didn’t intricate.
Tehran holds four known Americans now in jail. They include Baquer and Siamak Namazi, environmentalist Morad Tahbaz and Iranian-American funds manager Emad Shargi. The state television report didn’t promptly name the Iranians that Tehran expected to swap.
State television additionally cited the authority as saying an arrangement had been made for the United Kingdom to pay 400 million pounds to see the arrival of British Iranian lady Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. The office of Prime Minister Boris Johnson referred calls to the Foreign Office, which couldn’t be promptly reached.
A week ago, Zaghari-Ratcliffe was condemned to an extra year in jail, her legal advisor said, on charges of spreading “propaganda against the system” for partaking in a dissent before the Iranian Consulate in London in 2009.
That came after she finished a five-year jail sentence in the Islamic Republic subsequent to being indicted for plotting the defeat of Iran’s administration, a charge that she, her allies and rights groups deny.
While employed at the Thomson Reuters Foundation, she was arrested at the Tehran air terminal in April 2016 as she was getting back to England in the wake of seeing family.
Richard Ratcliffe, the spouse of Zaghari-Ratcliffe, revealed he didn’t know about any swap underway.
“We haven’t heard anything,” he said. “Obviously we most likely wouldn’t, yet my sense is to be skeptical as of now.”
Prior Sunday, U.K. Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab told the BBC that he believed Zaghari-Ratcliffe was being held “unlawfully” by Iran.
“I believe she’s been treated in the most oppressive, convoluted way,” Raab said. “I think it adds up to torment the manner in which she’s been dealt with and there is an extremely clear, unequivocal commitment on the Iranians to deliver her and those who are being held as influence quickly and without condition.”
