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Washington Denies Iran State Media Report Saying Prisoner Swap Agreed

The United States on Sunday denied a report by Iran’s state television that the arch-foes had reached a prisoner swap deal in exchange for the release of $7 billion frozen Iranian oil funds under U.S. sanctions in other…

ReutersMay 2, 20214 min read

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has also been finalized. The source also said the Biden administration has agreed to pay

Iran

$7 billion,” it said.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Ned Price said: “Reports that a prisoner swap deal has been reached are not true”.

“As we have said, we always raise the cases of Americans detained or missing in Iran. We will not stop until we are able to reunite them with their families.”

Ron Klain, White House chief of staff, also denied the report. “Unfortunately, that report is untrue. There is no agreement to release these four Americans,” Klain said on CBS “Face the Nation”.

Tehran and the powers have been meeting in Vienna since early April to work on steps that must be taken, touching on U.S. sanctions and Iran’s alleged breaches of the 2015 deal, to bring Tehran and Washington back into full compliance with the accord.

Iran says $20 billion of its oil revenue has been frozen in countries like South Korea, Iraq and China under the U.S. sanctions since 2018.

U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan, speaking on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, said no deal had been reached with Iran in Vienna.

“There is still a fair distance to travel to close the remaining gaps,” he said. “And those gaps are over what sanctions the United States and other countries will roll back. They are over what nuclear restrictions Iran will accept on its program to ensure that they can never get a nuclear weapon.”

ZAGHARI-RATCLIFFE

On the Zaghari-Ratcliffe case, British foreign minister Dominic Raab told Times Radio earlier on Sunday : “We recognise the IMS debt should be repaid and we’re looking at arrangements for securing that”.

A Foreign Office official later played down the speculation on her release.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a project manager with the Thomson Reuters Foundation charity, was freed from house arrest in March at the end of a sentence for seeking to overthrow Iran’s government.

An Iranian court sentenced her last month to another year in jail, weeks after she finished the prior five-year sentence, a decision Britain called “inhumane”.

She was arrested at Tehran airport in April 2016 and later convicted of plotting to overthrow the clerical establishment.

Her family and the foundation, a charity that operates independently of media firm Thomson Reuters and its news subsidiary Reuters, deny all charges against her and say she was only visiting relatives in Iran.

(Reporting by Maher Chmaytelli and Parisa Hafezi in Dubai, Additional reporting by Doina Chiacu and Humeyra Pamuk in Washington and William James in London, Editing by Frances Kerry and Angus MacSwan)