Five Americans imprisoned for years in Iran have been placed under house arrest in a Tehran hotel as a step prior to being repatriated. In exchange, Washington will release several Iranians and allow this country eventual and controlled access to 6,000 million dollars from the oil business, which are blocked by sanctions.
In this first step and after two years of more than discreet negotiations with one of the great enemies of the United States, the prisoners in Iran, who have dual nationality, left Evin prison on Thursday, a penitentiary with a bad reputation, and they were transferred to a hotel, where they will be under surveillance by the Iranian police until in a few weeks they board the plane that will take them back to the United States.
Without official confirmation, various media indicated that the Biden administration will release Iranian nationals who are serving prison sentences for violating the sanctions imposed on their country, although it is not known who they are and what they did.
In addition, the US will also transfer some $6 billion in assets from Iran that are being held in South Korea. The execution of the agreement establishes that this money will be deposited in an account of the central bank of Qatar. The government of this country, always according to the sources cited by the US media, will be in charge of controlling and regulating Iran's access to that capital. That sum must be used to pay for humanitarian purchases such as medicines and food, goods that are scarce in that country precisely due to the economic blockade due to its nuclear challenge.
In a statement, the White House applauded the movement of those incarcerated, who, while hopeful, "should never have been arrested and we will not rest until they are back," it was remarked. But they declined to add anything else because "negotiations are ongoing and are delicate."
The family of one of the prisoners with dual nationality, Siamak Namazi, 51 years old and sentenced to ten in 2015, had already confirmed the agreement. Namazi has been in prison for eight years, historically longer than any other American. Two others transferred to the hotel are Emad Sharghi and Morad Thahbaz, both arrested in 2018. All three were charged with insubstantial espionage charges.
The families of the other two chose not to reveal the names. One is a scientist and the other person is engaged in business. The three identified and one more were transferred on Thursday. The other prisoner, apparently a woman, went before them to the arrest situation.
Jared Genser, Namazi's lawyer, showed restraint in his statements. He expressed his confidence that this is the first step to the final liberation, the beginning of the end. But he acknowledged that nothing guarantees that it will happen from now on.
The Iran deal is one of a series of prisoner swaps secretly brokered by the Biden administration in its effort to bring home Americans the State Department calls wrongful detainees. The five involved in this exchange denied the accusations that Iran made against them.
