Iran and the United States have reached a prisoner exchange deal, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian said on state television on Sunday, but Washington denied the claim, calling it a “brutal lie.”

“On the issue of prisoner exchange between Iran and the US, we reached an agreement in the last few days, and if everything goes well from the US side, I think we will soon see a prisoner exchange,” Hossein Amirabdollahian said on Sunday. “Everything is ready from our side, and the US is currently working on the final technical agreement,” added the head of diplomacy in Tehran.

However, a White House official denied Amirabdollahian’s statement regarding the prisoner exchange, although he reaffirmed the United States’ commitment to the release of Americans held by Iran, CNN and Reuters reported, citing News.ro.

“Statements by Iranian officials that we have reached an agreement to release American citizens illegally detained by Iran are false,” a White House National Security Council spokesman said. “They are another lie, a particularly cruel one, that only adds to the suffering of their families,” Ned Price told CNN.

A prisoner swap is “closer than ever,” Reuters reported, citing a source briefed on the talks, but one remaining sticking point is more than $7 billion in Iranian oil funds frozen in South Korea under U.S. sanctions. “The logistics of how these funds will be transferred and how they will be monitored have not been decided,” said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The source added that Qatar and Switzerland participated in the talks on the exchange of prisoners. In addition, Iranian sources told Reuters that two regional countries participated in indirect talks between Tehran and Washington.

Who are the American citizens detained in Iran?

One of the few American citizens held in Iran is Siamak Namazi, a businessman with dual US-Iranian citizenship who was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2016 for espionage and cooperation with the US government.

Emad Sharghi, an Iranian-American businessman first arrested in 2018 while working for a technology investment company, is also imprisoned in Iran, as is Iranian-American environmentalist Morad Tahbaz, who also holds British citizenship.

Over the years, Tehran has sought the release of more than ten Iranians in the United States, including seven Iranian-American dual citizens, two Iranian permanent residents in the United States, and four Iranian citizens without legal status in the United States.

Human rights activists have accused the Islamic Republic, which holds dozens of Iranian dual nationals as well as foreigners, of arresting them in an attempt to extract concessions from other countries.

Last week, some Iranian media reported that Iran had reached a prisoner swap deal in exchange for the release of $7 billion in frozen Iranian oil funds.

Last March, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian aid worker, was released after six years in prison in Iran. She was released after Britain paid off a 400 million pound debt owed to Iran dating back a decade, but Tehran denies that this was linked to the prisoner’s release.

In 2018, then-US President Donald Trump scrapped the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and six nations and reinstated sanctions that had crippled the Islamic Republic’s economy. The agreement imposed restrictions on Iran’s nuclear activities in exchange for the lifting of international sanctions. In response to sanctions imposed by Washington, Tehran has gradually violated the pact’s limits on its nuclear program. Indirect negotiations between Tehran and the administration of US President Joe Biden regarding the restart of the agreement have reached an impasse since September. The agreement imposed restrictions on Iran’s nuclear activities in exchange for the lifting of international sanctions.