The U.N. nuclear agency certified Saturday that Iran has met all of its commitments under last summer’s landmark nuclear deal, crowning years of U.S.-led efforts to crimp Iran’s ability to make atomic weapons. For…
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The United States will release seven Iranians being held on sanctions-related charges and will also drop Interpol arrest warrants for other Iranian fugitives it has sought, according to Fars and the Associated Press.
Government officials have pressed Rezaian’s case during negotiations about Iran’s nuclear program.
The wife of an Idaho pastor who is among four detained Americans being released from Iran said Saturday that the news “was a huge burden lifted off”.
A fifth American detained in Iran, a student, was also released in a move unrelated to the prisoner exchange, Iranian media reported.
A source close to Iran’s judiciary is telling The Associated Press that four Iranian-Americans have been freed from prison in Iran: Washington Post bureau chief Jason Rezaian as well as Amir Hekmati, Saeed Abedini and Siamak Namazi.
The swap came as diplomats gathered in Vienna to announce the lifting of worldwide sanctions and bring the country of 80 million people back to the global economic stage.
Naghmeh says she has been receiving messages from congressmen and senators who have been so supportive of his release and return to the U.S. She even said she chatted with one of her very good friends, Senator Ted Cruz, over the phone Saturday morning.
He says “authorities at the top had agreed to free the four Iranian-Americans only after the Iranian prisoners land in Tehran”.
News of the reported exchange came as world leaders converged Saturday in Vienna in anticipation of the end of worldwide sanctions against Iran in return for significantly curtailing its nuclear program.
All were freed except for Rezaian, an Iranian-American who was convicted in a closed-door trial for espionage and other offenses including “collaborating with hostile governments”.
The other U.S.-Iranian nationals released were identified as Amir Hekmati, a former U.S. Marine accused of spying for the Central Intelligence Agency; Saeed Abedini, an Iranian American Christian pastor accused of attempting to undermine national security by establishing churches in private homes; and Nostratollah Khosravi, whose name had not previously been made public.
Then, on Tuesday, shortly before President Barack Obama was to deliver his final State of the Union address, Iran detained the US sailors and their boats.
Rezaian was tried past year in Iran’s Revolutionary Court system on charges which were never publically disclosed, before he was sentenced to an unspecified prison term. Hekmati was imprisoned in 2011 while visiting family in Iran. The Justice Department accused the three of being “members of an Iranian procurement network operating in the United States”, according to a news release at the time of the April 2015 indictment. “We should have not only kept them, we should have tightened them”, Huckabee told the Washington Post. Little is known about the fourth person released, Khosravi-Roodsari.
Rezaian, who was born in California and holds both US and Iranian citizenship.
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The United States is pardoning or commuting the sentence of an Iranian and six dual citizens as part of the deal. He was in Iran building an orphanage, Sekulow said.
