An Iranian-Swedish citizen found guilty of terrorism has been executed by hanging in Iran, raising controversy between the Islamic republic and the European Union, particularly Sweden which holds the rotating presidency of the EU, given the dual passport of 50-year-old Habib Farajollah Chàab, nicknamed Habib Asyud. He was a leader of the Harakat al-Nidal movement (Arab Movement for the Liberation of Ahwaz), a group fighting for the secession of Iran’s oil-rich and Arab-inhabited Khuzestan region against the Persian majority. Chaab’s death sentence, which was confirmed on 21 March, was, according to the Iranian Supreme Court, motivated by his role as organiser of several attacks that caused ‘a total of 247 deaths with the support of the secret services of Saudi Arabia, Israel and Sweden’. Swedish Foreign Minister Tobias Billstrom protested: ‘The death penalty is an inhuman and irrevocable punishment, and Sweden, with the rest of the EU, condemns its use under all circumstances. We appealed to Iran not to carry out the sentence’. He had been living in exile in Sweden since 2006, but in 2020 he had been kidnapped by the Iranian secret services, lured to Istanbul airport with the ‘sex trap’ of a woman enlisted by the Iranian services: he was drugged and then smuggled by accomplices across the Turkish-Iranian border.
