Time News Desk: Caracas on Saturday freed seven detained Americans in exchange for the release of two nephews of Venezuela’s first lady who were jailed in the United States for drug trafficking.
President Joe Biden issued the announcement that the Americans were on their way home and a senior official in his administration confirmed shortly afterward that the US leader had made the ‘painful decision’ to greenlight the prisoner swap to secure their freedom.
‘Today, after years of being wrongfully detained in Venezuela, we are bringing home Jorge Toledo, Tomeu Vadell, Alirio Zambrano, Jose Luis Zambrano, Jose Pereira, Matthew Heath, and Osman Khan,’ Biden said in a statement.
The negotiated release of ‘two young Venezuelans’ held in the United States was confirmed in a near-simultaneous statement by Caracas whose relations with Washington have been severely strained for years.
While Venezuelan authorities did not name the pair, they were identified by the senior US official as Francisco Flores de Freitas and his cousin Efrain Antonio Campos Flores—both nephews of President Nicolas Maduro’s wife, Cilia Flores.
Arrested in 2015 in a US sting operation in Haiti, the cousins were sentenced two years later to 18 years in prison for plotting to smuggle 800 kilos of cocaine into the United States.
The Venezuelan government says they were framed.
Five of the seven freed Americans were executives of the Citgo oil corporation, detained in 2017 while on a business trip to the South American country and accused of corruption.
Citgo is the US subsidiary of Venezuela’s state oil company PDVSA.
Iran is awaiting the release of about $7 billion in funds frozen abroad, state media said Sunday, after it allowed an Iranian-American to leave the country and released his son from detention.
Baquer Namazi, 85, was permitted to leave Iran for medical treatment abroad, and his son Siamak, 50, was released from detention in Tehran, the United Nations said on Saturday.
‘With the finalisation of negotiations between Iran and the United States to release the prisoners of both countries, $7 billion of Iran’s blocked resources will be released,’ the state news agency IRNA said.
Billions of dollars in Iranian funds have been frozen in a number of countries -- notably China, South Korea and Japan -- since the US reimposed biting sanctions on the Islamic republic in 2018 after unilaterally withdrawing from Tehran’s nuclear deal with world powers.
Tehran has accused Seoul of holding $7 billion of its funds ‘hostage’, repeatedly calling on South Korean authorities to release it.
IRNA on Sunday said that ‘Washington is pursuing at the same time the release of its citizens detained in Tehran and the release of Iranian funds in South Korea’.
The development comes as on-off talks have been underway since April 2021 to revive the 2015 deal that gave Iran much-needed sanctions relief in return for curbs on its nuclear programme.
Baquer Namazi is a former UNICEF official who was detained in February 2016 when he went to Iran to press for the release of his son Siamak, who had been arrested in October of the previous year.
Both were convicted of espionage in October 2016 and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
The father was released on medical leave in 2018 and had been serving his sentence under house arrest.
SK
