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Development worker Olivier Vandecasteele at an undisclosed location before his flight back to Belgium
Photo: BELGIUM'S PRIME MINISTER OFFICE HANDOUT / EPA
Belgian aid worker Olivier Vandecasteele is on his way to his homeland. He had been convicted in Iran and was released after more than a year in the course of a prisoner exchange, as the Belgian Foreign Ministry announced. In return, Iranian diplomat Assadollah Assadi, convicted of terrorism charges, was released, according to Iran's Foreign Minister Hussein Amirabdollahian. Oman had mediated in the prisoner exchange. On Sunday, his Sultan Haitham bin Tarik is expected in Tehran.
Assadi, arrested in Germany in 2018, was sentenced to 2021 years in prison by a court in Antwerp in 20 for allegedly planning an explosive attack on a major rally of Iranian opposition members in exile in France. Until the very end, Iran insisted that Assadi was innocent.
According to the Iranian judiciary, the aid worker Vandecasteele was sentenced to a total of 40 years in prison and 74 lashes. In particular, he was accused of espionage and cooperation with the arch-enemy USA as well as money smuggling.
The case is particularly explosive because, according to the investigation, the 51-year-old Assadi is an employee of the Iranian secret service, whose tasks include observing and combating opposition groups inside and outside Iran. It is therefore considered possible that the attack plans in France were based on a direct state order.
Iranian government's protest against arrest in Germany
This thesis is also supported by the opposition group NCRI, which is banned in Iran. The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) organized the mass rally on June 30, 2018 in Villepinte near Paris. It was also attended by numerous Western supporters, including the lawyer of then-US President Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani. The group is controversial in the Iranian diaspora. Some voices called for the deal to be prevented.
The Iranian government had already protested violently against the arrest of Assadi in Germany, because the man was accredited as a diplomat at the Iranian embassy in Vienna at the time of the crime. On 1 July 2018, he was arrested at a motorway service station near Aschaffenburg in Bavaria and then handed over from Germany to Belgium.
The German judiciary argued that the man was not under diplomatic protection when he was arrested because he was on a holiday trip outside Austria. The Federal Prosecutor's Office had obtained an arrest warrant against Assadi for, among other things, secret service agent activity and conspiracy to murder.
Critics accuse Iran of detaining foreigners and using them as bargaining chips to free its own imprisoned citizens. According to the Iranian government, there are currently talks about a prisoner swap with the United States. In 2016, Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian was released, along with three other U.S. citizens. In return, the U.S. pardoned seven Iranians accused of violating U.S. sanctions.
til/dpa