Siamak Namazi and Zhiyu Wang talk about "solitary confinement" and "forced confessions" in phone calls with their families
In an interview with NPR radio, families of American citizens imprisoned in Iran recounted some of the suffering their loved ones have endured in Iranian regime prisons.
NPR radio network spoke to the families of two American citizens imprisoned in Iran and asked about the phone calls they made to their families. Babak Namazi said that his brother wanted to be released from there.
In the report, published on Thursday, November 2, Babak Namazi said that his brother Siamak has spent a long time in solitary confinement. “My brother asks me in his phone conversations to get him out of there,” Babak Namazi said.
Hua Kuo, the wife of Princeton University doctoral student Zhiyu Wang, who went to Iran for research and is imprisoned there, also says that the last time she saw her husband in a remote video chat was in 2016, when he had just started his research in Iran. After that, she suddenly lost contact with him until one day he called and was just crying on the phone because he had been taken out of solitary confinement and told that he had to confess to the charges against him.
Zhiyu Wang was sentenced to 10 years in prison based on the same confession. Hua Kuo says he can now talk to his wife on the phone two or three times a week.
A number of American and non-American citizens are currently imprisoned in Iran – including Siamak and Bagher Namazi, Michael White, Zhiyu Wang, Aras Amiri, and Kamran Ghaderi. The fate of Robert Levinson, another American citizen who disappeared in Iran more than 12 years ago, is also unknown.
Nazanin Zaghari, an employee of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, was also arrested at Tehran International Airport on April 5, 2016, while she was planning to return to London with her two-year-old daughter after visiting family in Iran, and was later sentenced to five years in prison on security charges.
The United States Department of State has repeatedly condemned the Islamic Republic's regime's arbitrary and unjustified detention of American and other citizens, including dual-national Iranians, and called for their immediate and unconditional release.
Source: Voice of America
