Iran sentences Belgian aid worker to 12.5 years for spying

Iran has sentenced Belgian aid worker Olivier Vandecasteele for 12.5 years behind bars for espionage as well handing him 74 lashes, the judiciary said Tuesday.

Vandecasteele, 41, was handed multiple sentences totalling 40 years on a range of charges, but with the sentences to run concurrently he will serve 12.5 years behind bars, the judiciary’s Mizan Online website reported.

Iran arrested Vandecasteele in February 2022, and he has since been held in conditions that Belgium’s government has described as “inhumane”.

He was found guilty of “espionage against the Islamic Republic of Iran for the benefit of foreign intelligence services”, and given a 12.5 year sentence.

He was given the same sentence for the crime of “cooperation with the hostile government of the United States”.

Vandecasteele was given another 12.5 years for “money laundering”, as well as a further 2.5 years and 74 lashes for “professional currency smuggling to the amount of $500,000.”

The verdict can be appealed, it added.

Last month, Vandecasteele’s family said he had been sentenced to 28 years in prison, but it was not confirmed by Iran.

Belgium insists Vandecasteele is innocent and is being held as a hostage as Tehran attempts to force Brussels to release Assadollah Assadi, an Iranian diplomat convicted of terrorism.

Assadi, an Iranian diplomat who was stationed in Austria, was arrested in 2018 after Belgian, French and German security officers foiled a plot to set off a bomb at a rally outside Paris by an Iranian exiled opposition group.

After three years in detention, Assadi was sentenced in Belgium to 20 years in prison in May 2021.

Under a treaty Belgium and Iran signed in 2022, Vandecasteele would have been eligible to be swapped for Assadi.

But in early December, Belgium’s constitutional court suspended the implementation of the prisoner swap treaty pending a final ruling on its legality.