Belgian detained in Iran for “espionage”
Iran held a Belgian man for the past four months on charges of “espionage,” the Belgian justice minister said Tuesday as his country considered a controversial prisoner-swap treaty with Tehran.
The man was kidnapped in Iran on February 24 and has been in “illegal” detention ever since minister Vincent Van Quickenborne told Belgian MPs without identifying him.
Last year Belgium jailed an Iranian diplomat for 20 years after he was convicted of “terrorism” for planning a bomb attack outside Paris in 2018.
Although Quickenborne did not provide the identity of the Belgian detainee, Iran International, a London-based Saudi Arabian-funded media, reported that a 41-year-old former Belgian aid worker is detained in Iran.
The outlet said the Belgian’s arrest appeared to be another case in which Iran was “imprisoning foreigners as hostages to exchange them with some Iranians incarcerated in Western countries.”
Among those who hold Iran is a Swedish academic who also holds Iranian citizenship, Ahmadreza Djalali, who taught at a university in Brussels. Iran also filed charges of “spying” on Djalali and sentenced him to death.
Quickenborne said officials from the Belgian embassy in Tehran visited the jailed Belgian twice to provide all possible assistance and that his family had made his detention public on Tuesday.
“I cannot say more, at the express request of the family,” said the minister.
The Belgian parliament will vote on Thursday on whether to ratify a bilateral treaty with Iran that would pave the way for the repatriation of prisoners to every country.
Quickenborne said on Tuesday while presenting the proposed treaty to parliamentarians for debate that “if the bill is not fully approved, the threat to our Belgian interests and some Belgian citizens will increase.”
Some US lawmakers, however, are pressuring Belgium to abandon the proposed treaty, which was signed in March.
One, Randy Weber, a Republican representative in Texas, tweeted that he was “shocked to find that the Belgian government has concluded a deal with the world’s leading terrorist-sponsoring state and plans to send Iranian terrorists back to Iran to plot more terrorist acts. ”
The jailed Iranian diplomat, Assadollah Assadi, was convicted by a Belgian court in February 2021 for attempted “terrorist” murder and “participation in the activities of a terrorist group”.
He was found guilty of supplying explosives for a bomb attack outside Paris on June 30, 2018, held by the dissident group of the National Council of Resistance in Iran (NCRI).
Information provided by several European intelligence services allowed Belgium to foil the attack by intercepting the car carrying the bomb.
A two-year investigation into the plot found Assadi to be an Iranian agent operating under diplomatic cover.
Assadi was arrested in Germany, where his request for diplomatic immunity was denied because he was assigned to the Iranian embassy in Austria, and extradited to Belgium for trial.
He decided not to appeal his sentence. Tehran protested his condemnation of him.
NCRI lawyers, whose core is a militant organization known as the MEK, said the proposed Belgium-Iran treaty was designed to allow Assadi to return to Iran.
The controversy in Belgium over the treaty comes as European powers are trying to bring Iran and the United States back into compliance with a 2015 nuclear deal.
That pact was severely undermined when former President Donald Trump withdrew from America in 2018.
Iran has since taken a leap forward with its uranium enrichment to a level that brings it close to where it could produce nuclear weapons.
