Families of Imprisoned Dual Citizens: US Should Revoke Visas of Iranian Officials’ Children

Two sources close to American families imprisoned in Iran told NBC on Monday that these families have requested in a letter to the Donald Trump administration to revoke the visas of children of high-ranking officials of the Islamic Republic of Iran who are present in the United States.

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

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

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

The son of Masoumeh Ebtekar, Iran’s Vice President for Women and Family Affairs, is currently a student and resident of California. Masoumeh Ebtekar was one of the figures of the hostage-taking movement of 52 American diplomats at the embassy of this country in 1979.

It is said that the daughter of Ali Larijani, the Speaker of 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 adviser Hossein Fereidoun, is a student in New York.

Friends and families of dual nationals detained in Iran say that the visa issue for children of Iranian officials should be used as a pressure lever in this regard.

A U.S. State Department official who declined to be named, in response to a question about using the revocation of visas for children of Iranian officials, said: The United States is exploring all options to end the arbitrary detention of imprisoned Americans and will continue to pressure the Iranian government until this issue is resolved.

This U.S. State Department official declined to provide further explanation regarding his actions on this matter.

A number of American lawmakers, including Republican Senator Ted Cruz and Elliot Engel, support the request of families of imprisoned dual nationals to revoke the visas of children of Iranian officials.

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

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

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

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

Nizar Zakka, a Lebanese citizen with permanent U.S. residency, is also imprisoned in Iran.

There is no precise information about the total number of dual national prisoners in Iran; however, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, Abbas Araghchi, a mathematics and computer science professor at Imperial College London, and Kamal Foroogh are three Iranian-British citizens who are held in Iran.

Previously, Karen Vafafadari, an American citizen, along with her husband Afarin Nisari, were imprisoned in Iran.

Reuters reported last year that Iran’s intelligence services 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 issued a letter to world leaders calling on them to confront the longstanding practice of “state hostage-taking” in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

This 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 permanent residency, Kamran Ghaderi, an Iranian-Australian imprisoned since 2016, Ahmadreza Jalali, a physician and imprisoned 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 to the point where Islamic Republic officials are forced to free our loved ones.”

Source: Radio Farda