Belgium, Iran conduct prisoner swap

DUBAI Belgium and Iran exchanged prisoners on Friday in a controversial move that saw an Iranian diplomat convicted of attempting to bomb exiles in France bedecked in flowers on his return to Tehran while an aid worker was heading back to Brussels. The swap took place in Oman, long an interlocutor for the West with Iran.

Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo said in a statement that the aid worker, Olivier Vandecasteele, had been freed and said that for him, “the choice was always clear: Olivier’s life was always the most important.”

He said Vandecasteele had been unjustly held in Iran for 455 days and added that “in Belgium, we abandon no one. Not least someone who is innocent.”

Iranian state TV later showed the diplomat, Assadollah Assadi, being welcomed at the airport by Iran’s judiciary chief and the secretary of human rights council Kazem Gharibabadi. The TV showed Assadi sitting next to Gharibabadi, wearing a floral wreath around his neck and holding a bouquet of flowers.

In January, Iran sentenced Vandecasteele to a lengthy prison term and 74 lashes after convicting him of espionage in a closed-door trial. He was also fined $1 million (U.S.). Vandecasteele was arrested in Iran in February 2022 while packing up his belongings, after working with the Norwegian Refugee Council and Relief International in the Islamic Republic from 2015 to 2021, according to Amnesty International.

His family and the Belgian government strongly denied Iran’s claims, made without offering evidence, that he was a spy.

In 2021, Belgium convicted Assadi of masterminding a thwarted bomb attack against an exiled Iranian opposition group in France and sentenced him to 20 years in prison. Prosecutors tied Assadi to a couple, stopped by the Belgian police and found with 550 grams of TATP explosives and a detonator in 2018. They had been trying to target a meeting in Villepinte, France, of the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, an exiled Iranian opposition group known as the MEK.

Assadi was arrested a day later in Germany and transferred to Belgium. Belgian intelligence identified him as an officer of Iran’s intelligence and security ministry who operated undercover at the Iranian Embassy in Austria. Iran denied Assadi’s involvement.