Explained: Who is the Swedish doctor facing execution in Iran

Vida Mehrannia is trying to save her husband’s life. Iran is scheduled to put him to death within nine days — by May 21.

To Iran, the 50-year-old Ahmad Reza Jalali is a spy for Israel. To his colleagues, he is a respected physician specialized in disaster medicine, a most demanding field. To Mehrannia, he is a beloved husband.

“It’s a nightmare,” she told The Associated Press from Stockholm, where she lives with her 10-year-old son and 19-year-old daughter who have not seen their father in the six years since his arrest. “They want to sacrifice my husband.”

Mehrannia pins her fading hopes on Jalali’s Swedish citizenship and Stockholm’s attempts to push for his release. The extent of those efforts is unclear, though the Swedish foreign minister called her Iranian counterpart last week and, along with the European Union, demanded Jalali be released.

But it appears that Jalali’s very ties to Sweden are what landed him in an Iranian prison.

In Iran, some foreigners are pawns, both in Tehran’s internal political rivalries and in tensions between Tehran and Western capitals, analysts say. A pattern of Westerners being picked up has grown increasingly visible since the collapse of Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers.

On Wednesday, Iran said it detained two Europeans just hours after the European Union envoy touched down in the capital in a last-ditch effort to save the tattered atomic accord.

Iran has imprisoned at least a dozen dual nationals in recent years. Most of them are held on widely disputed spying charges.

Here’s a look at the forces at play in Jalali’s case.

HOW DID IT START?

Jalali was born in Iran’s northwestern town of Tabriz. He built a successful career in Italy and Sweden, publishing over 40 articles in medical journals and teaching across the continent. When an Iranian university invited him to a workshop in April 2016, he didn’t think twice about attending.

He never saw his family again.

Security services scooped him up, accused him of leaking details about Iranian nuclear scientists believed to have been killed by the Mossad and whisked him to Iran’s notorious Evin Prison where he was sentenced to death.

Meanwhile, a landmark quest in Sweden to hold accountable a former Iranian official accused of committing atrocities has kindled outrage back in Tehran.

The two cases have coincided uneasily. Hamid Nouri is standing trial in Stockholm for war crimes and murder committed during the Iran-Iraq war — a conflict that ended more than a quarter century ago and haunts Tehran to this day.

A United Nations panel describes their incarceration as part of “an emerging pattern involving the arbitrary deprivation of liberty of dual nationals.”