Swedish Diplomat's Sister Decries Brother's Detention In Iran
The sister of Johan Floderus, the Swedish EU diplomat detained in Iran, has condemned his captivity as a manipulative act within a larger “political game.”
The sister of Johan Floderus, the Swedish EU diplomat detained in Iran, has condemned his captivity as a manipulative act within a larger “political game.”
Floderus, 33, was detained by Iranian authorities in April 2022 at Tehran airport following a visit to a friend working at the Swedish embassy. Since then, he has been subjected to distressing conditions in Evin prison.
At the time of his arrest, Floderus was employed on the Afghanistan desk of the European External Action Service (EEAS), the diplomatic arm of the European Union.
Reports emerged last Sunday indicating that the Iranian prosecutor is seeking the death penalty for Floderus on charges of espionage for Israel and "corruption on earth," a capital offense under Tehran's Islamic laws.
Floderus becomes the latest victim of what many term “hostage diplomacy”, where Western citizens are arbitrarily detained by the Iranian regime on unfounded espionage charges. While previous detainees have been released following concessions by Western governments, the prosecutor's push for the death penalty has stunned Floderus' family.
Speaking to Euronews at a #FreeJohanFloderus campaign event in Brussels, his sister Ingrid Floderus emphasized his innocence, stating, "He is an innocent man. I don't think that anyone really feels like my brother has done those crimes that he has been accused of."
She added, "This is about some big political game where my brother is being used as a pawn, and that is really, for me, something I cannot accept."
Floderus, an alumnus of Oxford University, is believed to be caught in a web of political pressure aimed at the Swedish government. Observers suggest his detention could be linked to Tehran's efforts to coerce the release of Hamid Nouri, a former judicial official of the Islamic Republic, sentenced to life imprisonment for his role in the 1980s political prisoner massacre, which saw the execution of up to 5,000 individuals.
In an interview on Thursday, Albright warned that a “convergence of factors” means “this is the time that “Iran may decide to make nuclear weapons.”
“You have a situation where the security incentives for Iran to build nuclear weapons have increased,” he pointed out. “The transparency of the nuclear program has decreased significantly.. Their nuclear weapons capabilities have grown over the last several years… And it's also a point in time where people's attention is elsewhere. The Iran nuclear issue barely makes the newspapers these days.”
David Albright is a world leading weapons expert and the founder of the Institute for Science and International Security. He was associated with the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in the late 1990s and raised questions about the evidence that led to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Speaking with Iran International’s Fardad Farahzad, Albright called the current moment “a point of extreme danger”, where Iran can make a “crude” nuclear explosive in six months.
“By crude I mean, you can't put it on a ballistic missile and hope that it will survive,” he said. “But it would work underground as a test. And most importantly, it would just signify through, say, a week that Iran was a nuclear weapons power.”
In the past two decades, every US president has announced that a “nuclear Iran” will not be tolerated, often stressing that “all options are on the table” to prevent the regime in Tehran acquiring nuclear weapons. And in the meantime, Iran has advanced its nuclear capabilities in every respect.
The argument in some policy circles is that Iran would have to do tests to become ‘nuclear' and that would give the US government (or Israel) the time it needs to find a response. But Albright believes the evidence suggests otherwise.
“Iran does not need to do a nuclear test to build a nuclear weapon,” he said. “Their original weapons program that ended around 2003 was a program that was designed to avoid the need to conduct a ‘full scale’ test… they can test the components, the subcomponents, and then test the whole assembled device minus the weapons grade uranium, and have a way to know if that test was successful, which we call a cold test.”
There is no evidence at the moment to suggest Iran has had a ‘cold test.’ But it is something that can happen with relative ease and in a short time, according to Albright.
Which leads, inevitably, to the question: is there anything that can be done?
“President Biden, backed up by the Israeli government, should say that we are watching you, Iran, even though we have other priorities,” Albright said. “and if you move to make nuclear weapons, we're going to launch an overwhelmingly powerful military strike.
“And that's desperately needed is to empower the IAEA. They're the people on the ground that can look for suspicious activities. If Iran is going to make a nuclear weapon, it's going to have to divert at some point in the six month process the enriched uranium. And the IAEA can look for indications of diversion, insist on being at the sites, resist being excluded from the sites.”
But would any of these work?
“We know from past experience that Iran won't give in completely to this kind of pressure,” Albright said, “but it does get nervous. And that's part of the purpose is to throw the Iranian regime off balance and then in parallel, make sure that the Iranian regime understands that overwhelming military force could be applied.”
There is another side to this ‘threat’, though: it could convince the Iranian regime that it could survive only if it becomes a nuclear power –like North Korea, as some ultra hardliners in Iran would like to say.
But Albright believes a “balancing act” is possible if the US and Israel move swiftly to make the regime understand “it's not in its interest to build nuclear weapons” before it reaches a definite conclusion that it has to have “nuclear deterrent” against the US and Israel.
“We're worried that the US and Israeli intelligence agencies are distracted,” Albrighrt told Iran International, “and Israeli intelligence isn't foolproof, as this attack on October 7th proved in a very dramatic way.
