TEHRAN: The trial of two Swedish men accused of belonging to an “international drug trafficking network” has opened in Tehran, Iranian government media reported Thursday.
State daily Iran said that the two men, identified as “Stephen Kevin Gilbert” and “Simon Kasper Brown,” were brought before the 15th chamber of the capital’s revolutionary tribunal.
The judiciary’s Mizan Online agency said the pair entered Iran as tourists, but that one was arrested with almost 10 kilos (22 pounds) of opium resin and the other with 21,000 tramadol painkiller tablets.
Judicial authorities had announced their arrest in July 2020 as part of the “dismantling of an international drug trafficking gang,” without naming them or giving details of the arrests.
The Tehran trial begins as a former senior Iranian judicial official faces war crimes and murder charges in a Stockholm court.
Hamid Noury, 60, is being prosecuted for his suspected involvement in mass executions of Marxist and other left-wing prisoners in summer 1988.
The trial is taking place under the so-called “universal jurisdiction” principle which allows Sweden and some other countries to try people on such serious charges, even if the alleged crimes happened elsewhere.
Noury was arrested in November 2019 at Stockholm’s Arlanda airport while visiting Sweden.
Iran opens trial of Swedes on drug trafficking charges
https://arab.news/jq89n
Iran opens trial of Swedes on drug trafficking charges
- State daily Iran said that the two men were brought before the capital's revolutionary tribunal
- Judicial authorities had announced their arrest in July 2020 as part of dismantling an international drug trafficking gang
Syrian leader to meet Putin, Russia seeks deal on military bases
- Russia’s continued sheltering of Assad and his wife since their ouster remains a thorny issue
MOSCOW: Syrian President Ahmed Al-Sharaa will meet Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Wednesday, as the Kremlin seeks to secure the future of its military bases in the country.
Putin and Sharaa struck a conciliatory tone at their previous meeting in October, their first since Sharaa’s rebel forces toppled Moscow-ally Bashar Assad in 2024.
But Russia’s continued sheltering of Assad and his wife since their ouster remains a thorny issue. Sharaa has repeatedly pushed Russia for their extradition.
Sharaa, meanwhile, has embraced US President Donald Trump, who on Tuesday praised the Syrian leader as “highly respected” and said things were “working out very well.”
Putin, whose influence in the Middle East has waned since Assad’s ouster, is seeking to maintain Russia’s military footprint in the region.
Russia withdrew its forces from the Qamishli airport in Kurdish-held northeast Syria earlier this week, leaving it with only the Hmeimim air base and Tartus naval base on Syria’s Mediterranean coast — its only military outposts outside the former Soviet Union.
“A discussion is planned on the status of bilateral relations and prospects for developing them in various fields, as well as the current situation in the Middle East,” the Kremlin said of the upcoming meeting in a statement on Tuesday.
Russia was a key ally of Assad during the bloody 14-year Syrian civil war, launching air strikes on rebel-held areas of Syria controlled by Sharaa’s Islamist forces.
The toppling of Assad dealt a major blow to Russia’s influence in the region and laid bare the limits of Moscow’s military reach amid the Ukraine war.
The United States, which cheered Assad’s demise, has fostered ever-warmer ties with Sharaa — even as Damascus launched a recent offensive against Kurdish forces long backed by the West.
Despite Trump’s public praise, both the United States and Europe have expressed concern that the offensive in Syria’s northeast could precipitate the return of Islamic State forces held in Kurdish-held jails.
