Iran’s Foreign Ministry said Sunday that it is ready to implement a prisoner exchange deal with the US and that it’s up to Washington to make the swap happen.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani said that an agreement had already been reached on the issue.
“We have already voiced our readiness to exchange prisoners with the US, and we are still ready to do so. Negotiations have been conducted in different ways over the matter, and parties have reached the necessary agreements,” Kanaani said, according to Iran’s MEHR news agency.
“It is now up to the US administration to decide whether it wants to implement this agreement or not. We are prepared to enforce it,” he added.
According to MEHR, the prisoner swap deal was reached on the sidelines of the nuclear deal negotiations that were held in Vienna. Several US citizens are detained in Iran, and Tehran seeks the release of Iranians that have been arrested inside the US, mostly for alleged sanctions violations.
Last month, Kanaani made a similar call and said Tehran wants to help Iranians that had “fallen victim to the injustice [practiced] by the US’s legal establishment based on the hollow accusation of [them] violating the oppressive and illegal American sanctions.”
The chances of the US and Iran reaching an agreement to revive the nuclear deal, known as the JCPOA, seem unlikely. But the two countries have previously separated the two issues, having made a prisoner swap in 2019, not long after the Trump administration withdrew from the JCPOA by reimposing sanctions.