Siamak Namazi and Zhu Wang Report ‘Solitary Confinement’ and ‘Forced Confessions’ in Phone Calls with Families

Families of American citizens imprisoned in Iran discussed with NPR radio network some of the suffering their loved ones have endured in Iranian regime prisons.

NPR radio network spoke with families of two American citizens imprisoned in Iran about their phone conversations with them. Babak Namazi said his brother wants him to get him out of there during these phone calls.

Babak Namazi, in this report published Thursday, November 24, said his brother Siamak spent a long time in solitary confinement. Babak Namazi said: “My brother asks me in his phone calls to get him out of there.”

Hua Kou, wife of Zhu Wang, a Princeton University doctoral student who went to Iran for research and was imprisoned there, also says the last time she saw her husband in a remote video call was in 2016, when he had just begun his research in Iran. After that, there was suddenly no word from him until one day he called and was only crying on the line; because he had been taken out of solitary confinement and was told he must confess to the charges against him.

Based on that confession, Zhu Wang was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Hua Kou says now she can speak with her husband by phone two or three times a week.

Currently, a number of American and non-American citizens—including Siamak and Baquer Namazi, Michael White, Zhu Wang, Ares Amiri, and Kamran Ghaderi—are imprisoned in Iran. There is also no information about the fate of Robert Levinson, another American citizen who disappeared in Iran more than 12 years ago.

Nazanin Zaghari, an employee of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, was also detained at Tehran International Airport on April 6, 2016, while she and her two-year-old daughter were returning to London after visiting family in Iran, and was subsequently sentenced to five years in prison on security charges.

The United States State Department has repeatedly condemned the unjustified and arbitrary detention of American citizens and citizens of other countries, including dual-national Iranians, by the Islamic Republic regime and has called for their immediate and unconditional release.

Source: Voice of America