Ahmadreza Djalali only intended to leave Sweden for two weeks. Traveling to Tehran for a business conference, he assured his friends that he would be safe. Ten years later, Ahmadreza sits in prison in Iran, awaiting execution for a crime he did not commit.
April 25, 2026, marked ten years since the arrest of emergency doctor and scholar Ahmadreza Djalali. In April 2016, the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security arrested Ahmadreza as he drove from Tehran to Karaj. Authorities did not present a warrant and did not disclose his charges until two weeks later.
With that, the nightmare began for Ahmadreza, his wife, and his children. Ahmadreza has spent most of his ten-year confinement in Evin Prison, a brutal detention facility known for holding political prisoners, hostages, and dual citizens, among others. Ahmadreza was denied a lawyer for the first seven months of his detention, three of which were spent in solitary confinement and the other four in partial isolation. He was forced to publicly confess to espionage under duress, which included torture, mistreatment, threat of execution, and threats to harm or kill his children and mother. Ahmadreza has since stated that these confessions were fabricated, and that he was reading from a written script that his interrogators provided.
In October 2017, Ahmadreza was sentenced to death for “corruption on earth,” or untrue allegations that he provided intelligence to the Israeli government. During his trial, the prosecution cited the coerced confessions as evidence against him. In 2018, the Iranian Supreme Court upheld Ahmadreza’s death sentence, without allowing his lawyer to file submissions on his behalf.
Ahmadreza’s prolonged imprisonment has taken a severe physical and psychological toll. He has suffered from gastritis, gallstones, tooth and vision loss, anxiety, and depression. He has also experienced severe weight loss—illustrated by heart-wrenching photos that demonstrate the extent of his deterioration. In 2025, he suffered a heart attack but was not allowed to see a cardiologist for several days. Ongoing regional conflict has only worsened Ahmadreza’s ordeal, and that of his fellow inmates. Since the outbreak of war in Iran in February 2026, detainees have received inadequate food and supplies. Prisoners can hear nearby explosions but cannot flee or seek shelter.
Amid this horror, a crucial question remains: why Ahmadreza? The answer, as it turns out, is complicated. Ahmadreza contends that his arrest was retribution for a prior incident, in which he refused to leverage his European university ties to spy on behalf of Tehran. Moreover, as an Iranian national and legal resident of Sweden at the time of his arrest—and dual citizen of Sweden and Iran as of 2018—Ahmadreza has become an unfortunate pawn of hostage diplomacy.
The government in Tehran has long used hostage diplomacy to secure concessions from foreign adversaries. This refers to a tried-and-tested authoritarian practice, in which state actors exploit the domestic judicial system to provide legal cover for state-sanctioned hostage-taking. As national security experts Danielle Gilbert and Gaëlle Rivard Piché explain in a journal article on hostage diplomacy, “[t]his form of coercion occupies an ill-defined middle ground between legitimate arrests and prosecutions on one side, and illicit kidnapping on the other.” Iran has used the detention of dual citizens and legal foreign residents to extract sanctions relief, debt relief, prisoner swaps, and more. Iran does not recognize dual citizenship—often denying consular services to these detainees—yet the regime hypocritically exploits their dual national status for geopolitical gain.
As a dual citizen of Sweden and Iran, Ahmadreza has spent a decade in this geopolitical spider web. Tehran previously used the threat of Ahmadreza’s execution to try to compel a prisoner swap for a former Iranian official held in Sweden, Hamid Nouri. Tehran concurrently tried to trade Ahmadreza for former diplomat Asadollah Asadi, who was held in Belgium until 2023. Yet, according to both Ahmadreza and his wife Vida, Sweden and other EU countries have not done enough to try to secure his release. As Ahmadreza has stated, “[a]n end to my torture requires real and joint action by the European Union and the Swedish government. Otherwise, these governments will be partly responsible for my death.”
Ahmadreza is not a pawn. He is a doctor and scholar, who has spent his career trying to improve disaster readiness in global medical systems—including in Iran. He is a husband and father of two children. Ahmadreza’s son was so young at the time of his arrest that, for several years, the family told him that his father was away on a long business trip. He has missed too many birthdays, too many family dinners, too many milestones.
Ten years after his arrest, it is time for Ahmadreza’s nightmare to end. The international community must rally to his cause, calling for his release with a renewed force and purpose. Bring Ahmadreza home, before it is too late.
The John McCain Freedom for Political Prisoners Initiative at the McCain Institute is advocating for Ahmadreza’s release, along with other state hostages and political prisoners from Russia, Iran, Georgia, China, and Hong Kong. Learn more about our work to secure Ahmadreza’s freedom here.