Vida Mehrannia, the wife of Ahmadreza Djalali, an Iranian-Swedish doctor, marked the 3,000th day of his detention in Iran with a poignant post on the social media platform X.
“For 3000 days, our family has lived a nightmare, my children have waited 3000 days for their dad to come home and for 3000 days we have continued to fight,” she wrote Friday, tagging in her post Sweden’s prime minister, Sweden’s foreign minister and Belgium’s foreign minister.
In another post, she wrote, “This is not an anniversary that Ahmadreza and our family ever wanted to come.”
In an interview Friday with the Belgian newspaper De Morgen, Mehrannia accused the Belgian and Swedish governments of abandoning Djalali.
Barry Rosen, a former American hostage in Iran, said on X that he and several other families of European hostages in Iran joined Mehrannia at the European Parliament in Brussels on Thursday. They urged the European Union to counter hostage-taking and hold the perpetrators accountable.
Djalali was arrested in spring 2016, when he traveled to Tehran at the University of Tehran’s invitation to deliver a lecture.
Iranian judicial authorities sentenced Djalali to death on charges of espionage, a claim denied by both Djalali and his wife. He has resorted to hunger strikes to protest the court’s decision and the looming threat of execution.
In a recent audio recording, Djalali, a dual national, criticized Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, expressing disappointment and feelings of being abandoned during last month’s prisoner exchange with Iran.
Regarding the release from Iranian prisons of European Union diplomat Johan Floderus, a Swedish citizen, and Saeed Azizi, an Iranian-Swedish dual-national, Djalali said, “I see my continued detention in Iran as a clear case of discrimination.”
Floderus and Azizi were released in a June exchange for an Iranian national, Hamid Nouri.
Nouri, a former deputy prosecutor of Iran’s Gohardasht Prison, received the highest penalty under Swedish law — a life imprisonment sentence — from the Swedish Supreme Court. He was convicted of war crimes for his involvement in the mass executions of Iranian political prisoners during the 1980s.
The release and return of Nouri to Iran sparked outrage from human rights groups and activists.
Earlier this month, Nasrin Sotoudeh, a lawyer, human rights activist and recipient of the European Parliament’s “Sakharov Prize,” expressed concern about the plight of Djalali.
“The treatment he faces in prison is not much different from execution. Ahmadreza Djalali has been placed in solitary confinement three times for the purpose of carrying out his death sentence,” she wrote in a letter addressed to the European Parliament.
Sotoudeh criticized the Swedish government’s handling of negotiations with the Islamic Republic concerning the prisoner swap, describing their disregard for Djalali as “regrettable, concerning, and a clear case of discrimination.”
In her letter, Sotoudeh urged the European Parliament to use all its official and legal capacities to secure Djalali’s release.
