Iran hints at swapping jailed journalist

Tehran: The Washington Post said on Monday that its correspondent Jason Rezaian, who has been jailed for 14 months in Iran on espionage charges, had been convicted after a trial that ended two months ago.

Iran appeared to be moving on Monday to position Rezaian’s case as part of a broader effort to get the release of Iranians detained in the United States.

On Monday, a state television news channel accused Rezaian, a dual US-Iranian citizen, of providing information to the United States about individuals and companies who were helping Iran circumvent international economic sanctions.

Iranian leaders, including President Hassan Rouhani, have raised the idea of a prisoner swap, suggesting that Rezaian, 39, could be exchanged for people who Tehran says are being held by or on the orders of the United States for violating sanctions.

The website of the Islamic Republic of Iran News Network has said Rezaian, who has been The Post’s Tehran bureau chief since 2012 but has been living in that country on and off since 2003, was arrested on charges of spying on Iran’s nuclear programme and of collecting information about sanctions violations.

“He began to identify individuals and companies that violated sanctions and were cooperating with Iran,” the network said on its website. “The information that Rezaian gave to the Americans had led many Iranian and international businessmen and companies to be included in America’s sanctions list.”

The speaker of the Iranian parliament, Ali Larijani, suggested last month that the US could obtain Rezaian’s release with an exchange of prisoners.

Speaking to CBS’s “60 Minutes” program in Tehran in an interview broadcast on September 20, Rouhani was even more clear. “We have Iranians who are imprisoned in the United States, Iranians who are being pursued, and most of them are being pursued for circumventing the sanctions,” he said. “From the beginning, we considered the sanctions to be wrong, and we encouraged everyone to circumvent them. We consider all of those prisoners to be innocent and consider it wrong that they are in prison.”

Asked again if he would support the idea of a prisoner exchange, Rouhani said: “I don’t particularly like the word exchange, but from a humanitarian perspective, if we can take a step, we must do it. The American side must take its own steps.”

— New York Times News Service