Iran has moved five Americans from jail to house arrest in the first step of a delicate deal that would unfreeze billions of dollars in Iranian funds and allow the prisoners to leave the Islamic republic.
The progress on the prisoners – one of them detained for nearly eight years – comes after quiet diplomacy between the adversaries, whose separate talks on restoring a nuclear deal broke down.
“My belief is that this is the beginning of the end of their nightmare, and the nightmare that their families have experienced,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Thursday.
Sources familiar with the negotiations said the next step would be the transfer of $US6bn in Iranian oil revenue frozen in South Korea to a special account in Qatar which Iran could access only for humanitarian purchases such as food and medicine.
Iran described the deal as a prisoner swap, with the state-run IRNA agency quoting Tehran’s mission to the UN as saying that each country will be “granting amnesty and releasing five prisoners”. If all goes as planned, the American prisoners could leave Iran sometime next month, one source said.
Four of the prisoners – Siamak Namazi, Emad Sharqi, Morad Tahbaz and another who preferred to remain anonymous – were taken out of Tehran’s notorious Evin prison on Thursday, a day after US President Joe Biden’s administration informed their families of the deal. The four were escorted to a hotel where they would remain under guard, a lawyer for one of the prisoners said.
Read the article by Shaun Tandon in The Australian.