Families and friends of the five Americans released by Tehran receive them in Houston, Texas, yesterday (Reuters)

Information that US President Barack Obama’s administration deferred the announcement of new sanctions for a month in order to ensure the return of its prisoners was disclosed yesterday. A day before the American administration was scheduled to impose sanctions, the Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif warned his US counterpart John Kerry that this step could hamper a prisoner exchange agreement which was negotiated by the two sides secretly for months.

Kerry and a number of senior aides to President Obama, who was on holiday in Hawaii, held a series of telephone conferences and concluded that they cannot risk losing an opportunity to free the Americans held by Iran. Officials of Obama’s administration decided to postpone imposing sanctions linked to the missiles at the last minute according to Reuters.

The United States unilaterally imposed these sanctions yesterday after Iran released 5 Americans who were in its custody including The Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian. Charges against 8 Iranians accused of violating American sanctions in the United States were either dropped or reduced on Saturday in a complex deal according to informed sources on the matter.

Kerry’s decision regarding additional sanctions which were scheduled for December reveal how the secret negotiations for the release of the Americans were intertwined with the final endeavor to implement the nuclear deal despite the insistence of the US official positions that these sanctions are separate from the agreement. An American official said on Saturday that there is no link between the nuclear deal and the release of the Americans.