Detained Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian will appear in an Iranian court Monday for what likely will be the last hearing in his closed-door espionage trial, his lawyer said Saturday.
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His lawyer isn’t providing details of today’s closed-door hearing, but she says she submitted a 20-page defense brief and also provided an oral defense of reporter Jason Rezaian (reh-ZY’-ahn).
In a statement on the Post’s website on Monday, the paper’s executive editor Martin Baron said the four secret hearings in 10 weeks amounted to “a sham trial” and it remained unclear even to Rezaian’s lawyer what would happen next.
Ali Rezaian, brother of Jason Rezaian, The Washington Post’s Tehran correspondent on trial in Iran, gives an update on his detention at a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington on July 22, 2015.
“The verdict will be issued and communicated to us within a week”, she told AFP by telephone in Tehran. All were sat free except Rezaian, a dual-citizen Iranian-American facing charges of “espionage, collaboration with hostile governments, gathering classified information and disseminating propaganda against the Islamic Republic”.
Her son, his wife Salehi and two photojournalists were all arrested in July 2014 in Iran.
She stated her son was lonely and exhausted.
Some U.S. lawmakers also have questioned why negotiations with Iran over a nuclear deal did not include explicit demands from Washington for the release of Rezaian and other Americans held in Iran.
“The verdict for Mr Jason Rezaian will be delivered and her (Salehi s) trial and the third person s will be later”, Ahsan said, though it is not known what charges either would face.
Salehi, who was for a United Arab Emirates newspaper, was released on bail along with another photographer two and a half months later. There is no reason to accuse him in the lawsuit.
Rouhani told reporters in June he is following the case and committed to pursuing the legal rights of all Iranians, including those with other nationalities. In the next few days you may hear the Iranian Court challenge Jason’s standing as a journalist to justify the fact that they have held him in prison without evidence for a year.
Her husband has spent much of his incarceration in solitary confinement, and has been denied bail.
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Baron urged the court to acquit and release Rezaian, saying Iran had a chance to bring the case to a “humane resolution”.
