Iranian authorities detained Australian university lecturer Kylie Moore-Gilbert after discovering she was in a relationship with an Israeli citizen, sparking baseless claims that she was a spy for Israel.
Dr Moore-Gilbert, an Australian-British academic detained in Iran for more than two years, was released on Thursday morning in exchange for three Iranian men linked to a botched 2012 bomb plot in Bangkok.
The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald can reveal the Australian government played a crucial behind-the-scenes role in bringing Thailand to the table and engineering the prisoner swap deal that has allowed Dr Moore-Gilbert to be released.
The complicated prisoner-swap deal — which Prime Minister Scott Morrison repeatedly declined to confirm on Thursday — involved high-level negotiations with the Thai government.
Multiple senior government and diplomatic sources confirmed that Dr Moore-Gilbert was detained in Iran in 2018 after authorities found out her partner was Israeli.
This led to Iranian authorities stopping Dr Moore-Gilbert at Tehran airport while she was leaving the country after attending an academic conference in 2018. Authorities made allegations the Melbourne University lecturer was working as a spy for Israel and sentenced her to 10 years behind bars for espionage. The Australian government and Dr Moore-Gilbert rejected the Iran government’s allegations as baseless.
Australian government sources, who asked not to be named as they had not been authorised to discuss the negotiations, said it had taken more than six months of at-times delicate discussions to put the deal together.
Read the article by Anthony Galloway and James Massola in The Sydney Morning Herald and the Brisbane Times.