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

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

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

NBC says that currently four US citizens and one person with US residency are imprisoned in Iran.

According to this report, the families of these prisoners have presented to US government and lawmakers a list of children and relatives of senior Islamic Republic officials, including the nephew of Hassan Rouhani, President of Iran.

The son of Masoumeh Ebtekar, Vice President of Iran for Women and Family Affairs, is currently a student and resident of California. Masoumeh Ebtekar was one of the faces of the 52 American diplomats hostage-taking incident at the country’s embassy in 1358 (1979).

It is said that the daughter of Ali Larijani, Speaker of Parliament, is currently completing her medical residency at a hospital in Ohio.

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

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

A US State Department official who requested anonymity, in response to a question about revoking visas of Iranian officials’ children, said: The United States is pursuing all options to end arbitrary detention of American detainees and will continue to pressure the Iranian government until this issue is resolved.

This US State Department official declined to provide further explanation about its actions on this matter.

A number of American lawmakers, including Republican Senator Ted Cruz and Elliot Engel, support the request of families of dual citizen prisoners to revoke visas of Iran’s officials’ children.

In this regard, an official from Elliot 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.

Zhao Wang, a Chinese-American researcher at Princeton University, has been sentenced to ten years in prison in Iran and is currently 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 on charges of “cooperation with a hostile state, the United States.”

Mohammad Baqer Namazi was a former UNICEF official in Iran and governor of Khuzestan Province before Iran’s February 1979 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.

Nazar Zaka, a Lebanese citizen with permanent residency in the United States, is also imprisoned in Iran.

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

Previously, Karen Vafadarid, an American citizen, along with her husband Afarin Niasari, had been imprisoned in Iran.

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

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

Letter from Six Dual Citizen Families

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

This letter was signed by the families of Robert Levinson, a former US federal police officer, Nazar Zaka, Saeed Malekpour, a materials engineering graduate from Tehran’s Sharif University of Technology with Canadian residency, Kamran Ghaderi, an Iranian-Australian who has been imprisoned since 2016, Ahmadreza Jalali, an imprisoned doctor 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