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.
He said he was "stunned" by the charges against him.
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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