Details on the duration of their detention were not disclosed.
Iran’s ambassador to Doha announced on Tuesday that 17 Iranians who were detained for unintentionally entering Qatari seas had been released.
Envoy Hamid Dehghani tweeted that the 17 men had been freed along with their boats and were returning to Iran.
The individuals who were seized were imprisoned for entering Qatari seas “by mistake,” said Dehghani. However, the timing of the men’s arrest and the length of their confinement were not disclosed.
Qatar has in recent weeks received praise from Iran for its heavy diplomatic role in affairs between Tehran and Washington.
In late March, Tehran confirmed the Gulf country’s role in talks over the exchange of prisoners as well as the revival of the 2015 nuclear deal.
“Qatar is always moving in the right track and has played a role in the prisoner exchange talks and the nuclear deal,” Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, Iran’s Foreign Minister, told Al Jazeera.
The issue of the prisoner swap has been at the centre of the stalled nuclear talks, though Iran has ruled out using prisoner swaps as a precondition to restore the nuclear accord, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
Doha helped facilitate talks over the potential prisoner swap in September last year, during the United Nations General Assembly, the Financial Times reported in March.
A month after the reported meeting in New York, Tehran temporarily released Iranian-American businessman Siamak Namazi and lifted a travel ban on his father.
Both the father and the son received a 10-year prison sentence in 2016 and were convicted of espionage.
Other reports also pointed to a plan that would see the United States release more than $7 billion of Iran’s money that had been frozen in South Korean banks in exchange for the release of the prisoners.
Qatar is likely participate by helping with the money transfer, according to the potential agreement.
Iranian funds were frozen following Washington’s unilateral withdrawal from the JCPOA under the former Donald Trump administration in 2018 in a bid to apply “maximum pressure” on the Islamic Republic.
Qatar has served as the interlocutor between Iran and the US in the nuclear talks and has repeatedly stressed the need for the restoration of the JCPOA.
Talks over the revival of the nuclear deal initially started in 2021 in Vienna but have yielded no results. Qatar stepped in last year by hosting another round of talks in its capital.
