Tehran
Iran on Monday rejected 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 described 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,” said spokesman Abbas Mousavi.–AFP
