Families of imprisoned dual nationals: US should cancel visas for children of Iranian officials
Two sources close to the families of Americans imprisoned in Iran told NBC on Monday that the families have written a letter to the Trump administration asking it to revoke the visas of the children of high-ranking Iranian officials who are in the United States.
These sources said that these families are waiting for the White House to take action in this regard.
NBC says that four US citizens and one US resident are currently imprisoned in Iran.
According to the report, the families of these prisoners have provided the American government and lawmakers with a list of children and relatives of high-ranking officials of the Islamic Republic, including the nephew of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani.
The son of Masoumeh Ebtekar, Iran's vice president for women and family affairs, is also currently a student and resident of California. Masoumeh Ebtekar was one of the figures involved in the hostage-taking of 52 American diplomats at the country's embassy in 1979.
It is said that the daughter of Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani is also doing her residency at a hospital in Ohio.
According to this report, Hassan Rouhani's nephew and the son of his former advisor, Hossein Fereydoun, is a student in New York.
Friends and families of dual-national detainees in Iran say the issue of visas for the children of Iranian officials should be used as leverage in this regard.
A US State Department official, who asked not to be named, said in response to a question about the use of visa cancellations for children of Iranian officials: The United States is seeking to use all options to end the arbitrary detention of detained Americans and will continue to pressure the Iranian government until this issue is resolved.
The US State Department official declined to provide further explanation about its actions in this regard.
A number of American lawmakers, including Republican Senators Ted Cruz and Elliott Engel, are supporting the request of families of dual-citizen prisoners to cancel the visas of the children of Iranian officials.
In this regard, an official in the office of Representative Eliot Engel, a Democrat from New York, who is expected to chair the Foreign Relations Committee in the upcoming House of Representatives, has 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 in prison.
Siamak Namazi, a dual Iranian-American citizen, was arrested in October 2015 while traveling to Tehran. He was sentenced to ten years in prison in court on charges of “collaborating with the hostile American government.”
Mohammad Bagher Namazi was a former UNICEF official in Iran and the governor of Khuzestan before the Iranian revolution of 1979. He had traveled to Iran to follow up on the condition of his eldest son, Siamak Namazi, and was arrested in March 2015. Bagher Namazi is currently on sick leave outside prison and is banned from leaving.
Nizar Zakka, a Lebanese citizen with permanent residency in the United States, is also imprisoned in Iran.
There is no information on the exact number of dual-nationality prisoners in Iran, but Nazanin Zaghari, Abbas Adalat, a professor of mathematics and computer science at Imperial College London, and Kamal Foroughi are three Iranian-British citizens who are imprisoned in Iran.
Previously, American citizen Karen Vafadari and her husband, Afarin Nissari, were imprisoned in Iran.
Reuters reported last year that IRGC intelligence had arrested at least 30 dual nationals between 2015 and 2017 on charges of "espionage."
According to Reuters, 19 of these people had European citizenship.
Letter from six dual-citizen families
On the same day, six families of dual-citizen prisoners wrote a letter calling on world leaders 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 US Federal Bureau of Investigation agent, Nizar Zaka, Saeed Malekpour, a materials engineering graduate from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran and a Canadian resident, Kamran Ghadiri, an Iranian-Australian who has been imprisoned since 2016, Ahmadreza Jalali, a physician and researcher in prison, and Siamak Namazi.
The authors of the letter have made it clear that without international pressure, the Islamic Republic will show no willingness to end the hostage-taking.
These families emphasized, "World leaders must raise the political cost of human rights violations to such an extent that the authorities of the Islamic Republic are forced to release our loved ones."
Source: Radio Farda
