An Iranian journalist who travelled to Sweden with the foreign minister of Iran last week and fled during the trip is trying to claim asylum in Europe over fears of arrest.
The journalist, Amir Tohid Fazel, said he had managed to slip away from the delegation that accompanied Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister.

“I said I was going to go smoke,” Fazel explained. “Then I started to walk toward a gathering of people and pretended to be talking on my phone. When I was in the group of people I started to run.”

He stopped to change clothes and discard the SIM card in his phone, then hailed a taxi that took him to a police station, where he asked for asylum.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif holds a lecture at Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) in Stockholm, Sweden, August 21, 2019. TT News Agency/Janerik Henriksson via REUTERS Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif holds a lecture at Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) in Stockholm, Sweden, August 21, 2019. TT News Agency/Janerik Henriksson via REUTERS Fazel’s defection last week while on a Nordic tour in Zarif’s press pool surprised some in the Iranian news media who saw him as an ally of the conservative political elites aligned with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.
Roozbeh Mirebrahimi, an Iranian journalist and scholar who now lives in New York, asserts Fazel was present when Mirebrahimi was interrogated in the infamous Evin prison in Tehran, where he was held for months in 2004.

Fazel said that when he left Iran for the trip he had not planned to defect. But he was contacted on social media by a colleague from his office in Tehran who said four people dressed as civilians had gone to the news agency with an arrest warrant. The friend told Fazel to make sure his family was not at home.

“I understood that I would be a victim of the power struggle that is going on in Iran,” Fazel said. “That is when I decided.”

He was referring to the tensions between hard-line and reformist factions of the political elite who have very different views for the future of the country.

Fazel said his reporting on the dual citizenship of high-level officials in Iran had gotten him into trouble. Iran does not recognise dual citizenship.

He said a member of parliament had provided him with a list of officials in the government of President Hassan Rouhani who are also citizens of countries deemed hostile to Iran.

It is unclear if Fazel would be entitled to seek asylum in Sweden.