Jeff Bezos flies Jason Rezaian home on private jet

Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian headed home to the United States on Friday, days after being freed from 18 months in prison in Iran as part of a historic prisoner exchange between Tehran and the United States.

It was only after US Secretary of State John Kerry called his Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif, that the Iranian prosecutor general issued an order allowing Salehi and Mary Rezaian to board the plane to Germany, the Post reported.

Post editors Martin Baron and Douglas Jehl were in Germany when Rezaian arrived on Sunday, CNN reports.

“Today my family and I left Landstuhl to return home to the United States”, Rezaian said in a statement.

Rezaian served as the Post’s bureau chief in Tehran before he was imprisoned for espionage in the summer of 2014, then convicted previous year in what was widely seen as a sham trial.

A photo taken shortly before their departure on Friday shows Bezos, the founder of Amazon, with his arm around Rezaian smiling aboard the private aircraft that has been decorated with streamers and posters with the message: #FreeJason.

Jason Rezaian, Washington Post reporter and one of the US citizens recently released from detention in Iran, poses with his wife Yeganeh Salehi and mother Mary Rezaian outside the Emergency Room of the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in the southwestern town of Landstuhl, Germany, January 20.

They caught the break they needed last weekend during the prisoner swap, which paved the way for Jason to take a flight out of Iran and into Germany.

“Like all of us, he is incredibly happy they are safe and sound”, a Post spokeswoman said of Bezos. But they also expressed their happiness that Rezaian and the others would soon be coming home.

“The Iranians, as they have done all along, continued to manipulate them, continued to try to mess with them, and prevented Yegi from leaving for some period of time”, Ali Rezaian told CNN on Monday. He has indicated that he plans to speak and write about his imprisonment at some point in the future.