Brussels – VRT, April 24, 2025
“I am at my breaking point,” Swedish-Iranian professor Ahmad Reza Djalali tells VRT’s Inge Vrancken in a new audio message. Tomorrow it’s exactly nine years since Djalali was arrested in Iran. Since then, he has been locked up in the notorious Evin prison in the capital Tehran. He risks being executed there. Djalali calls on the EU and the Swedish government to do more for his release.
After 9 years in captivity Ahmad Reza Djalali describes how the inhuman conditions he experiences in prison have led to numerous illnesses including heart function failure, gastritis, intestinal disorders and severe weight loss. I am really at my breaking point, Djalali says.
He calls on the European Union and the Swedish government to do more for his release. ‘Otherwise, I will die here, either by execution or disease,’ he notes.
Misses prisoner swap
Djalali feels discriminated against by the Swedish and Belgian governments. In the audio message he says that several times he has been used as a bargaining chip in potential prisoner swaps.
Djalali and everyone around him had hoped he would be swapped for Iranian terrorist Assadollah Assadi, convicted in Belgium. The latter had been sentenced to 20 years in prison for planning an attack targeting Iranian opposition figures in Paris.
But Assadi was not exchanged for Djalali – who has a clear link to Belgium through his work for the VUB – but rather for Olivier Vandecasteele, the Belgian NGO worker unjustly detained in an Iranian cell for 456 days. Vandecasteele was released as part of an exchange on 26 May 2023.
