DUBAI, August 14. /TASS/. Unfreezing Iranian assets in South Korea was not among the conditions for prisoner exchange between Tehran and Washington, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian said on Monday.

"Prisoner exchange is a purely humanitarian issue and has nothing to do with the restoration of access to our assets in foreign banks, the Tasnim news agency quoted him as saying.

He noted that the agreement between Iran and the US, which was mediated by a third country, contains two separate agendas about the prisoner swap and the release of Iran’s assets, Tasnim said.

According to the top Iranian diplomat, Iranian assets were converted from South Korean wons into euro and deposited with a European bank. He did not specify the country where the country’s money is frozen.

The New York Times reported on Thursday that the United States and Iran had reached an agreement on prisoner exchange. On the same day, the While House confirmed such n agreement but suggested that it would be expedient to wait until US nationals are back home from Iran before announcing the completion of the deal.

Iran’s mission to the United Nations said that Tehran and Washington had agreed to exchange prisoners in the five-to-five format. Under the deal, Tehran will receive access to $6 billion of its assets frozen in South Korean banks due to the US sanctions. According to the mission, these assets will be unblocked and transferred to Qatar. Iranian Central Bank Governor Mohammad Reza Farzin said on August 12 that the assets had already been unblocked and were about to be converted into euro.

After its withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, the United States imposed sanctions on Tehran and banned eight biggest importers of Iranian oil, including South Korea, to buy it from Iran. After that, Seoul, at the United States’ request, froze around $7 billion Tehran was to receive for its oil supplied to South Korea in recent years. South Korea deposited the money meant to pay for Iranian oil with its banks but could not transfer it to Iran due to the US sanctions.