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Iran has released a Belgian aid worker jailed in Tehran for 455 days on spying charges, in exchange for Belgium releasing a former Iranian diplomat convicted in 2021 of a foiled bomb plot, an official from the country said on Friday.
The aid worker, Olivier Vandecasteele, was flown late Thursday from Tehran to Muscat, the capital of Oman, where the exchange took place, Belgium’s prime minister, Alexander De Croo, said on Friday.
“At the moment, our compatriot Olivier Vandecasteele is on his way to Belgium,” Mr De Croo said in a video speech from Brussels, confirming that the government had secured Mr Vandecasteele’s release. He added that Mr. Vandecasteele had undergone a medical examination to assess his health after more than a year “in very difficult conditions.”
Mr. Vandecasteele had worked in Iran for five years until he lost his job in March 2021 and left the country. When he returned to retrieve some items in February last year, he was arrested by Iranian authorities, who sentenced him to 40 years in prison and 74 lashes on charges of espionage, money laundering and currency smuggling. The Belgian government called Mr. Vandecasteele’s imprisonment arbitrary and said Iran had not provided any information about the case.
In exchange for Mr. Vandecasteele’s release, Oman negotiated the release of Assadollah Assadi, an Iranian diplomat who was arrested in Germany in 2020 on charges of planning a bomb attack on a meeting of Iranian opposition leaders in France in 2018. The attack was foiled, but he was later convicted in Brussels in 2021 and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Photographs posted last Friday by Mizan, a news agency overseen by the Iranian court, appeared to show that Mr Assadi had arrived in Tehran.
In a statement posted on Twitter earlier Friday, Iran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, thanked the Omani government for making the exchange and sending Mr. Assadi, “an innocent diplomat of our country, illegally detained in Germany and Belgium for more than two years against international law” returned to Iran.
Belgium’s parliament approved a much-criticized deal with Iran in July last year that allowed for a prisoner exchange between the two countries. Critics of the deal say the country is giving in to a form of blackmail from Iran, which puts foreigners at greater risk of being taken prisoner.
On Friday, Belgian authorities said they would not use the agreement to negotiate Mr. Vandecasteele’s release, according to the Belga news agency. However, analysts say, Iran has made a practice of using Westerners as pawns.
“It has been a consistent policy of the Iranian government for decades, to use the hostage-taking of foreign nationals and dual nationals for foreign policy purposes,” said Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the Center for Human Rights in Iran, which is based in New York. . “Unfortunately this continues to work for them,” he added, noting that each prisoner exchange “only encourages the Iranian Revolutionary Guards to take more hostages.”
In a statement on Friday, Amnesty International applauded Mr. Vandecasteele’s release but said he was “deeply disturbed” by the exchange deal that only perpetuated “the climate of impunity for extraterritorial targeting of Iranian dissidents for extrajudicial execution, torture, and ill-treatment.”
Kylie Moore-Gilbert, a British-Australian scholar, was released in 2020 in exchange for three Iranians jailed in Thailand for masterminding a plot to kill an Israeli diplomat in 2012.
Earlier this month, Iran freed two French citizens, Benjamin Brière and Bernard Phelan, after they were accused of spying. Nazanin Zaghari-Ratliffe, a British-Iranian, was released in March after 6 years in detention as a diplomatic pawn, according to her family.
Mr. Ghaemi noted that the latest exchange has taken place against the backdrop of an increase in executions in the country. At least 209 people have been killed since January, according to the United Nations.
More than two dozen foreign and dual nationals are still being held in Iranian prisons.
Koba Ryckewaert and Leily Nikounazar contribute reports.
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