Swedish citizen Johan Floderus expressed his immense joy following his release from an Iranian prison on Saturday, according to a recording published on the
Swedish government's website on Sunday.
Sweden and Iran conducted a prisoner exchange on Saturday. Sweden released a former Iranian official convicted for his involvement in the mass execution and torture of political prisoners in Iran in 1988, while Iran freed two Swedish nationals who were being held there.
"I'm in the sky, but emotionally I'm in seventh heaven. I have been waiting for this for almost 800 days," Floderus said during a telephone call with Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson while on his flight back to Sweden.
Floderus, an employee of the European Union, was arrested in Iran in 2022 and charged with espionage for Israel and "corruption on earth," a crime punishable by death.
He described dreaming about his release countless times, only to wake up on a concrete floor. "Now it is starting to sink in that I have left Iranian airspace and I am on my way back home again," he said.
In a radio interview earlier on Sunday, Prime Minister Kristersson addressed criticism from the wife of Swedish-Iranian dual national Ahmadreza Djalali, who remains imprisoned in Iran after Tehran refused to include him in the exchange.
"I have a lot of respect for her disappointment, but don't really understand the criticism. The alternative would have been to leave the two Swedes who could now come home," Kristersson told Swedish radio. Photo by Ehsan Iran, Wikimedia commons.