Iran rejects US order to pay $180 million over reporter’s jailing

Iran on Monday rejects a US court order for Tehran to pay $180 million in damages to a Washington Post reporter for jailing him on espionage charges.

Jason Rezaian spent 544 days in an Iranian prison before he was released in January 2016 in exchange for seven Iranians held in the United States.

On Friday, a US district court judge ordered damages be paid to Rezaian and his family in compensation for pain and suffering as well as economic losses.

The Iranian foreign ministry’s spokesman describes the journalist’s decision to seek damages as “strange.”

“Mr Jason Rezaian… was a security convict and the Islamic Republic of Iran commuted his (sentence of maximum punishment) to imprisonment,” says spokesman Abbas Mousavi.

“He was pardoned and despite having an open case… he was released,” Mousavi tells a news conference in Tehran.

“For him to go there and lodge a complaint and for American courts to lavishly determine such figures” was a course of action that Iran “rejects,” says Mousavi.

“This was a favor that the Islamic Republic of Iran did for him,” he says, adding that he could have been kept behind bars and punished more severely.

Mousavi says Iran could itself take similar legal action against the United States, without elaborating.

— AFP