Reuters Reports Iran, US Near To Prisoner Swap
Reuters news agency reported Tuesday that sources “close to the negotiations” in nuclear talks claim a prisoner exchange between Iran and the US was looming.
Reuters last week reported that a “draft text of the agreement” to revive the 2015 nuclear deal, the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action)m between Iran and world powers would begin with Iran restricting uranium enrichment to 5 percent, “the release of Western prisoners held in Iran,” and Washington lifting a threat to sanction South Korean banks over repatriating $7 billion Iranian assets.
The agency Tuesday cited a “senior Iranian official in Tehran” that "Iran has always and repeatedly expressed its readiness” to swap prisoners.
“Months ago we were ready to do it but the Americans ruined the deal," the official reportedly said. "Now I believe some of them will be released, maybe five or six of them. But those talks about prisoners are not linked to the nuclear agreement, rather associated with it. This is a humanitarian measure by Iran."
On Saturday, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said the Islamic Republic was ready for an immediate prisoner exchange. Tehran would like to see the release of Iranians jailed in the US, mostly over sanctions violations, including businessman Sajjad Shahidian. In 2018 foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, himself sanctioned by the US the following year, said Iranians were held in the US as “hostages.”
US special envoy Robert Malley has appeared to suggest it unlikely that Washington would return to the JCPOA, which it left in 2018, unless Tehran freed four American prisoners, including father and son Baquer and Siamak Namazi.
"Six years ago the Iranian government arrested Baquer Namazi and they still refuse to let him leave the country," Malley tweeted on Tuesday. "The Iranian government can and must release the Namazis, Emad Shargi, Morad Tahbaz, and other unjustly held U.S. and foreign nationals."
State Department issued a statement Tuesdaysaying that Baquer Namazi had been arrested six years earlier to the day “solely for the purpose of using him as a political pawn” and that both father and son had been “sentenced to ten years in prison on baseless charges.”
Key issues to be fixed
Britain has been seeking the release of British-Iranians Anousheh Ashouri, jailed on espionage charges, and Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a project manager with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, under house detention in Tehran.
Both Enrique Mora, chairing the Vienna talks, and Mikhael Ulyanov, Russia’s lead negotiator in Vienna, tweeted Tuesday that the negotiations were near to conclusion. Mora, however, noted that “key issues need to be fixed.”
Reuters cited “several Iranian officials” who said that while “some minor technical issues were being discussed in Vienna” and while “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed," they expected a deal “before the end of the week.”
Speaking to a conference of gas-exporting countries in Doha Tuesday, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi said that the world should refused “cruel” US sanctions, which would no longer be effective “in today's world.”
