12 March 2023 :
(March 12, 2023) - Supreme court has upheld the death sentence of Habib Farajollah Chaab, a Swedish Iranian dual national convicted of leading an Arab separatist group accused of attacks including one on a military parade in 2018 that killed 25 people, state media reported on Sunday.
Iran said in 2020 that its security forces arrested Sweden-based Habib Farajollah Chaab (also Habib Alaswad) in Turkiye and took him to Tehran, without saying where or how he was captured.
“Chaab was sentenced to death after several court sessions with the presence of his lawyer ... The Supreme Court confirmed his death sentence,” Iran’s judiciary’s Mizan news agency reported.
In 2022, Iran started trial of Chaab on charges of leading the separatist Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahwaz, which seeks a separate state in the oil-rich Khuzestan province in southwestern Iran, and plotting and carrying out “numerous bombings and terrorist operations.”
He was sentenced to death for being “corrupt on earth,” Iranian state media said.
The Islamic Republic has had tense relations with its ethnic minorities, which include Arabs, Kurds, Azeris and Baluch, and has accused them of aligning with neighboring countries rather than Tehran.
The confirmation of Chaab’s death sentence comes amid soured relations between Iran and Sweden over a Swedish court’s life time in prison sentence for Hamid Noury, a former Iranian official for involvement in the mass execution of political prisoners in 1988 in the Islamic Republic.
Iran has rejected former Iranian official Hamid Noury’s sentence as “baseless, distorted and fabricated.”
For the Chaab’s case see also HoC November 1, 2020, December 12, 2020, December 2, 2021 and February 20, 2023.
For the Noury’s case see also HoC 14/11/2021, 10/01/2022, 10/03/2022, 02/05/2022, 04/05/2022, 09/05/2022, 24/05/2022, 02/07/2022, 14/07/2022 and 15/07/2022.
https://www.arabnews.com/node/2267021/middle-east