A 38-year-old Swiss-Iranian
businessman arrested in Milan three days before Italian
journalist Cecilia Sala was detained in Iran said Tuesday he was
an academic and not a terrorist as he fights extradition to the
US on charges of supplying drone parts allegedly used in a
January 2023 attack that killed three US servicemen in Jordan.
Mohammad Abedini Najafabadi's arrest at Malpensa Aiport on
December 16 is believed to have spurred Tehran's arrest on
December 19 of Sala, an Il Foglio freelance correspondent and
Chora News podcaster who has been generically charged with
breaching Islamic law and is widely seen as being used by the
regime as a pawn to get back Abedini, whose alleged accomplice
Mahdi Mohammad Sadeghi was arrested in the US also on December
16.
Both men have been charged by Washington with sanctions-busting
trafficking in electronic drone parts allegedly used in last
January's fatal attack on the servicemen near the
Jordanian-Syrian border.
"I am an academic, a scholar: I am certainly not a terrorist. I
do not understand this arrest, I cannot understand it", said
Abedini through his lawyer, Alfredo de Francesco.
Abedini made his statement during a meeting with the Iranian
consul in Milan at Opera Prison.
Italy says it is working tirelessly but with discretion to get
back Sala, a 29-year-old Rome-born reporter whose detention as a
possible exchange hostage has spurred a rising online tide of
support under the hashtag #FreeCecilia.
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