A Swedish court on Thursday sentenced a former Iranian official to life in prison for his part in the mass execution and torture of political prisoners in the 1980s, APA reports citing Reuters.
Hamid Noury, 61, who was arrested at a Stockholm airport in 2019, was charged with war crimes for the mass execution and torture of political prisoners at the Gohardasht prison in Karaj, Iran, in 1988.
Handing down its conviction and sentence, the Stockholm District Court said Noury, who it said was an assistant to the deputy prosecutor at the prison, had been "jointly and in collusion with others been involved in the executions", which it described as a "serious crime against international law".
Iran condemned the verdict. "Iran is absolutely certain that Noury's sentence was politically motivated and it has no legal validity," Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesperson Nasser Kanaani said in a statement.
Amnesty International has put the number executed on government orders at around 5,000, saying in a 2018 report that "the real number could be higher". Iran has never acknowledged the killings.
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