Ahmadreza Jalali, an Iranian-Swedish academic who has been facing execution in Iran for the past eight years, is to begin a hunger strike this week.
"The only way anyone can hear his voice in the world is to just start a hunger strike" on Wednesday, said his wife, Vida Mehrannia.
Last month, Iran released two Swedes in exchange for Hamid Nouri, 63, a former Iranian prisons official who was given a life sentence in Sweden in 2022 for his role in mass killings in Iranian jails in 1988.
The two Swedes were EU diplomat Johan Floderus, held in Iran since April 2022 on espionage charges, and Iranian-Swede Saeed Azizi, arrested in November.
Mr Jalali, imprisoned in Tehran's notorious Evin prison after an espionage conviction, missed out on the swap.
In an audio message on June 19, Mr Jalali criticised Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson for his decision "to leave me behind under huge risk of being executed".
Ms Mehrannia said in a statement to AFP on Tuesday that "as a medical doctor, Ahmadreza knows all too well that his fragile physical state makes a hunger strike potentially fatal, but he sees no other option".
She said he suffered from "heart arrhythmias, bradycardia, hypotension, chronic gastritis, anaemia, and extreme weight loss from his previous two hunger strikes".
"This physician, loving husband and father of two wants to be reunited with his family," she said.
"He wants to serve society once more as a dedicated doctor. He wants to be recognised and treated as a human being again.
"Ahmadreza is now pleading to the world for help. He needs this endless brutality to end."
The Iranian authorities announced they would execute Mr Jalali in 2022 but that was halted after his lawyers appealed.
Iran had previously threatened to execute Mr Jalali in 2020, as a Belgian court was considering verdicts in the case of Assadollah Assadi, an Iranian spymaster, who was accused of plotting to blow up a dissidents’ rally in France.
The threat of immediate execution was lifted, even after Assadi was convicted and jailed for 20 years.
Last year, when Mr Nouri was convicted for his role in the prison massacres in Iran, the Iranian media released a propaganda video with Mr Jalali’s forced “confessions”.
He was told again in December 2023 that he would be executed.
The Swedish government has insisted that it tried to secure Mr Jalali's release but Tehran refused to recognise him as a Swedish citizen, as he was only an Iranian national when he was arrested and received his Swedish citizenship later.
"We had the choice of either bringing Johan and Saeed home, or dropping everything. It's the brutal truth, but I have a lot of respect for her disappointment," Mr Kristersson said of Ms Mehrannia to SVT on Tuesday.
She is scheduled to have a meeting with Foreign Minister Tobias Billstrom on July 2 to discuss her husband's case.
Iran has in recent years been accused of detaining dual and foreign citizens as hostages to use as bargaining chips to extract concessions.
Last year, five US citizens held by Iran were freed in return for Washington issuing a waiver for international banks to transfer $6 billion in frozen Iranian money from South Korea to Qatar.
World Test Championship table
1 India 71 per cent
2 New Zealand 70 per cent
3 Australia 69.2 per cent
4 England 64.1 per cent
5 Pakistan 43.3 per cent
6 West Indies 33.3 per cent
7 South Africa 30 per cent
8 Sri Lanka 16.7 per cent
9 Bangladesh 0
COMPANY PROFILE
Name: Kumulus Water
Started: 2021
Founders: Iheb Triki and Mohamed Ali Abid
Based: Tunisia
Sector: Water technology
Number of staff: 22
Investment raised: $4 million
Conflict, drought, famine
Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.
Band Aid
Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.
In numbers: PKK’s money network in Europe
Germany: PKK collectors typically bring in $18 million in cash a year – amount has trebled since 2010
Revolutionary tax: Investigators say about $2 million a year raised from ‘tax collection’ around Marseille
Extortion: Gunman convicted in 2023 of demanding $10,000 from Kurdish businessman in Stockholm
Drug trade: PKK income claimed by Turkish anti-drugs force in 2024 to be as high as $500 million a year
Denmark: PKK one of two terrorist groups along with Iranian separatists ASMLA to raise “two-digit million amounts”
Contributions: Hundreds of euros expected from typical Kurdish families and thousands from business owners
TV channel: Kurdish Roj TV accounts frozen and went bankrupt after Denmark fined it more than $1 million over PKK links in 2013
Company Profile:
Name: The Protein Bakeshop
Date of start: 2013
Founders: Rashi Chowdhary and Saad Umerani
Based: Dubai
Size, number of employees: 12
Funding/investors: $400,000 (2018)
Company%C2%A0profile
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