Families of Imprisoned Dual Nationals Call on U.S. to Revoke Visas of Children of Iranian Officials

Two informed sources close to the families of Americans imprisoned in Iran told NBC on Monday that these families have requested in a letter to the Donald Trump administration to revoke visas for children of senior officials of the Islamic Republic government who are present in the United States.

These sources said these families are awaiting action from the White House on this matter.

NBC reports that currently four U.S. citizens and one person with U.S. permanent residency are imprisoned in Iran.

According to the report, the families of these prisoners have provided the U.S. government and lawmakers with a list of children and relatives of senior Islamic Republic officials, including Hassan Rouhani’s nephew, Iran’s president.

Massoumeh Ebtekar’s son, Vice President of Iran for Women and Family Affairs, is also currently a student and resident of California. Massoumeh Ebtekar was one of the figures involved in the hostage-taking of 52 American diplomats at the U.S. embassy in 1979.

It is reported that the daughter of Ali Larijani, speaker of the parliament, is currently completing her residency at a hospital in Ohio.

According to this report, Hassan Rouhani’s nephew and the son of his former advisor Hossein Feridon are students in New York.

Friends and families of dual national detainees say that the visa issue for children of Iranian officials should be used as leverage in this matter.

A U.S. State Department official who requested anonymity responded to a question about using visa revocation for children of Iranian officials, saying: The United States is pursuing all options to end the arbitrary detention of Americans in custody and will continue to pressure the Iranian government until this issue is resolved.

The U.S. State Department official declined to provide further details about his actions in this regard.

Several American lawmakers, including Republican Senator Ted Cruz and Eliot Engel, support the request of families of dual national prisoners to revoke visas for children of Iranian officials.

In this regard, an official from Eliot Engel’s office, the Democratic representative from New York, who is expected to chair the House Foreign Affairs Committee in the next Congress, said that he supports any action that leads to the release of the detainees.

Xiao Wang, a Chinese-American researcher at Princeton University, has been sentenced to ten years in prison in Iran and is imprisoned.

Siamak Namazi, holding dual Iranian and American citizenship, was arrested during a trip to Tehran in September 2015. He was sentenced to ten years in prison in court on charges of “cooperation with the hostile U.S. government.”

Mohammad Baqir Namazi was a former UNICEF official in Iran and governor of Khuzestan Province before the February 1979 Iranian Revolution. He traveled to Iran to follow up on the condition of his grandson, Siamak Namazi, and was arrested in March 2016. Baqir Namazi is now on medical leave outside of prison and is banned from leaving the country.

Nizar Zakka, a Lebanese citizen who has permanent residency in the United States, is also imprisoned in Iran.

There is no information about the exact number of dual nationals imprisoned in Iran; however, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, Abbas Edalat, a mathematics and computer science professor at Imperial College London, and Kamal Foroughi are three Iranian-British citizens imprisoned in Iran.

Previously, Karen Vafafdari, an American citizen, along with her husband Afshin Nisar, were imprisoned in Iran.

Reuters reported last year that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps detained at least 30 dual nationals between 2015 and 2017 on charges of “espionage.”

According to Reuters, 19 of these individuals held European nationalities.

Letter from Six Dual National Families

On the same day, six families of imprisoned dual nationals sent a letter to world leaders urging them to confront the long-standing practice of “state hostage-taking” in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The letter was signed by the families of Robert Levinson, a former U.S. federal police officer, Nizar Zakka, Saeed Malekpour, a materials engineering graduate from Sharif University of Technology with Canadian residency, Kamran Ghaderi, an Iranian-Australian imprisoned since 2016, Ahmadreza Djalali, a imprisoned physician and researcher, and Siamak Namazi.

The authors of this letter emphasized that without international pressure, the Islamic Republic will show no willingness to end hostage-taking.

These families stressed that “world leaders must raise the political cost of human rights violations so high that Islamic Republic officials are forced to release our loved ones.”

Source: Radio Farda