The official Iran daily said Wednesday that the man, identified only as Mehdi, was arrested two months and is being held in Tehran's Evin prison.

He is presumed to be Mehdi Tayeb, 50, who was quoted as telling a Tehran judge he contracted HIV from a Swedish woman in Paris in the early 1990s and later moved to Sweden.

The newspaper cited Swedish sources as saying Tayeb had unprotected sex with 140 women there between 1993 and 1998, with 20 to 25 of them having been drugged and raped. He allegedly also had sex with men.

It said Tayeb also had sex with a number of Iranian women students, and published his photograph with a plea from investigators for "anyone having complaints against him to contact the prosecutor's office."

According to Swedish press reports, Tayeb had been in Miami, Florida when he assumed the identity of a man named James Kimball, who died in March 1985.

He moved in 1992 to Sweden, where he obtained a residence permit in 1993 and was officially registered as having no income.

America's Most Wanted web site said Tayeb was known to go to discotheques on a nightly basis to pick up women.

It cited officials as saying that on the nights he did not meet a willing candidate he would use the "date rape" drug Rohypnol to incapacitate his victims and then rape them.

Iran quoted Tayeb as telling a Tehran judge he had been jailed in the United States for six months in 1985 for assaulting a woman in a disco.

"After my release, I paid 500 dollars for the passport of a dead American named James Kimball and then I went to France. In 1991, I found out I had AIDS, which a Swedish woman had given me."

The newspaper quoted him as saying he returned to the United States, where he met a Swedish woman who followed him to Sweden.

"I lived in Sweden for six years and, in 1998, when I found out the police were looking for me, I left Sweden using the passport of my friend, Mohammad Marouz.

"I took a ship for Denmark, and then a train through Germany and the Netherlands. I then took a airplane to Istanbul, where I paid 250 dollars to be smuggled into Iran."

Iranian investigators were quoted as saying Tayeb is fluent in English, French, Swedish and Turkish, and had deceived a number of Iranian girls, promising to marry them.

In Iran, he variably passed himself off as either an American or a Canadian, and used the names James and Robert, the investigators said.

Iranian investigating magistrate Seyed Mohammad Tabatabai-Nejad said that "despite his being HIV positive, he managed to stay in good shape, taking six different types of medication and doing a lot of sports. He looked good."

Stockholm police spokeswoman Stina Wessling told AFP that her office had not been informed of the arrest. "Perhaps he was arrested in Iran for another crime, in which case they would get to us later on," she said.

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