Arrest

On November 9, 2019, Swedish police arrested Nouri at Arlanda Airport. Swedish police had been alerted to Noury's imminent arrival after a tip-off from his former son in law, Hirossch Sadeghi. Sadeghi, after unsuccessfully trying to alert two journalists at the BBC Persian and VOA Farsi, found a survivor of the executions, Iraj Mesdaghi, who immediately, in the presence of Sadeghi, telephoned Kaveh Moussavi, an Oxford based human rights lawyer in the UK. Moussavi immediately mobilised a legal team with colleagues Dr Rebecca Mooney and Matthew Jury. The legal team interviewed several witnesses, and drafted Representations setting out the factual and legal basis on which Noury was suspected of committing grave crimes during the 1988 Prison Massacres in Iran. Moussavi, Mooney and Jury, with Swedish Advokat Göran Hjalmarsson, submitted the Representations and evidence to the Swedish War Crimes Police on November 4 2019, alerting them to Noury's imminent arrival, and urging the authorities to arrest, investigate and prosecute Noury for crimes against international law. Nouri was arrested under the rules of universal jurisdiction, in which a national court can prosecute anyone for atrocities, regardless of where they were committed.