The man, a 46-year-old Swedish-Iraqi national, is suspected of gathering information on members of the Ahvazi Arab exile community for a four-year period between April 2015 and February 2019 when he was arrested.
The Ahvazi are an Arab ethnic minority living in the southwest Iranian province of Khusestan. The minority group faces discrimination and persecution by authorities there, according to
The man was charged with collecting personal information "under cover of representing an Arabic evening paper, having photographed and filmed Ahvazi conference delegates and demonstration participants in Belgium, the Netherlands and Sweden," prosecutor Hans-Jorgen Hanstrom said in a statement.
Information gathering activities the man conducted included infiltrating online forums where he found phone numbers and addresses, taking photos of license plates, and gleaning internet log-in details of members of the Ahvazi community.
He allegedly compiled this information and shared it with Iranian security forces in Tehran or online, said the Swedish prosecutor.
The suspect, who has been in pre-trial detention since March 1, has denied the charges.
Unrest in the Iranian province of Khusestan goes back at least 100 years, when a local leader rebelled against Reza Shah Pahlavi's rule.
The Ahvaz National Resistance®, an Iranian ethnic Arab movement for the secession of oil-rich Khusestan from Iran, grabbed credit for an attack in the region's capital Ahvaz that killed 25, leading Iran
...a theocratic Shiite state divided among the Medes, the Persians, and the (Arab) Elamites. Formerly a fairly civilized nation ruled by a Shah, it became a victim of Islamic revolution in 1979. The nation is today noted for spontaneouslytaking over other countries' embassies, maintaining whorehouses run by clergymen, involvement in international drug trafficking, and financing sock puppet
militiasto extend the regime's influence. The word
Iranis a cognate form of
Aryan,the abbreviation
IRGCis a cognate form of
Stürmabteilung (or SA),the term
Supreme Guideis a cognate form of either
Shahor
Führeror maybe both, and they hate
to arrest hundreds of Ahvazi Arabs.
In January of this year, the EU froze the assets of an Iranian intelligence unit after the Netherlands accused Iran of two killings there, and joined La Belle France and Denmark in alleging that Tehran plotted other attacks across Europe
...the land mass occupying the space between the English Channel and the Urals, also known as Moslem Lebensraum...
.