TEHRAN, Iran — Iran said Monday it would try three Americans jailed since crossing the border from Iraq in July, a step certain to aggravate the U.S. at a time when Tehran is locked in a standoff with the West over its nuclear program.
Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki did not say when proceedings would begin or specify the charge other than to say the Americans had "suspicious aims." In November, however, authorities accused the Americans of spying.
There are concerns in the U.S. that Iran could use them as bargaining chips in talks over its nuclear program or in seeking the return of Iranians they say are missing.
Relatives and the U.S government say the three were innocent tourists on a hiking trip in northern Iraq and accidentally crossed into Iran, where they were arrested on July 31.
"They will be tried by Iran's judiciary system and verdicts will be issued," Mottaki said at a news conference, without elaborating in detail. He said the three were still being interrogated.
Even if the Americans are tried, however, there is still a chance they could be released fairly soon.
Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi was convicted of espionage and sentenced to eight years in prison, before she was released on an appeal in May.
Canadian-Iranian journalist Maziar Bahari of Newsweek was released in October on bail and allowed to leave the country after being swept up in the post-election crackdown on street protests.
The Americans — Shane Bauer, 27, Sarah Shourd, 31, and Josh Fattal, 27 — were detained by Iranian authorities after crossing an unmarked border from northern Iraq.
A senior Iranian prosecutor accused three Americans detained on the border with Iraq of espionage on Monday, the first signal that Tehran intends to put them on trial.
US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called for the release of the three. The announcement came as Washington and Tehran are maneuvering over a deadlock in negotiations over Iran's nuclear program.
"We believe strongly that there is no evidence to support any charge whatsoever," Clinton told reporters in Berlin. "And we would renew our request on behalf of these three young people and their families that the Iranian government exercise compassion and release them, so they can return home."
Clinton said the US would continue to make that case through the Swiss channels who represent US interests in Tehran.
Shane Bauer, Sarah Shourd and Josh Fattal, all graduates of the University of California, Berkeley, were arrested July 31 after straying over the Iranian border from northern Iraq. The US government and their families say there were on a hiking vacation and crossed accidentally.
Tehran chief prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dowlatabadi says the three "have been accused of espionage" and that investigations were continuing, according to the state news agency IRNA. He said an "opinion (on their case) will be given in the not distant future."
It is not clear from his comments whether formal charges had been made, but such announcements are often a sign that charges are imminent if not already filed. In Iran's opaque judicial system, the process of indictment and trial often takes place behind closed doors.
The timing of the announcement raised the possibility that Iran was using the case to pressure the United States amid the negotiations over its nuclear program.
Iran is also holding another American, academic Kian Tajbakhsh, who was arrested amid Iran's postelection turmoil and was sentenced last month to 12 years in prison for an alleged role in opposition protests.
In January, Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi was arrested in Tehran, was convicted of espionage, then released on appeal in May. Two months later, US forces in Iraq freed five Iranians who they had been holding for months.
Akiko Saberi, the Japanese mother of imprisoned Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi, holds her daughter's photo in Tehran, Iran.
May 11
An American reporter jailed in Iran on espionage charges was freed Monday and can leave the country immediately, her lawyer said after an appeals court suspended her eight-year prison sentence.
Abdolsamad Khorramshahi, one of Roxana Saberi's attorney, said she is "now out of jail."
Iran's judiciary announced that the appeals court, which heard her case on Sunday, had reduced her jail term to a suspended two-year sentence, Khorramshahi said.
Saberi, a 32-year-old dual American-Iranian national who grew up in Fargo, North Dakota, was convicted last month of spying for the U.S. and sentenced to eight years in prison. An appeals court heard her case on Sunday.
Her case caused tension between the United States and Iran at a time when President Obama had said he wanted to engage Washington's longtime adversary in a dialogue. The U.S. has called the charges against her "baseless" and demanded she be freed.
Reuters earlier reported that Saberi had been released, but later changed their report to say she would be freed sometime on Monday.
Saberi's father, who lives in Fargo, North Dakota, said he was waiting for his daughter outside Evin prison, where she has been held since January.
"In the next few days, we will make travel plans to return home," Reza Saberi told the AP.
Roxana Saberi, who grew up in Fargo, moved to Iran six years ago and had worked as a freelance journalist for several organizations including National Public Radio and the British Broadcasting Corp. She had gone on a hunger strike in prison to protest her jailing but ended it earlier this month after two weeks for health reasons.
U.S. Senator Byron Dorgan said her release would be "wonderful" but also stressed that her jailing was a "miscarriage of justice" that "could not stand the test of public opinion."
"They [Iranian officials] surely must have felt the weight of international pressure," the North Dakota Democrat told the AP.
The Paris-based Reporters Without Borders also welcomed the decision to suspend Saberi's sentence and looked forward to her imminent release.
The former 1997 Miss North Dakota was arrested in late January and initially accused of working without press credentials. But an Iranian judge later leveled the far more serious charge of espionage.
Iran has not released many details about her case. Iran's intelligence minister has said that the initial investigation was done by an expert on security and counterespionage at the Intelligence Ministry before her case was referred to court.
Her Iranian-born father has said his daughter had been working on a book about the culture and people of Iran, and hoped to finish it and return to the United States this year.
The United States broke off ties with Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution and the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran by hard-line students.
Reporters without Borders reports that Iranian-American journalist, Roxana Saberi — sentenced last Saturday to 8 years in prison after a sham 1 day closed trial in Tehran — is protesting her detention with a hunger strike. (For more background on Saberi, and her dubious arrest by Iranian authorities, read this profile by her former employer, the BBC.)
Even Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, not typically the most civil liberties friendly, had directly appealed to the Iran’s independent judiciary to process the case of Saberi with openness and transparency. Perhaps he is feeling the pressure of a potential American rapprochement. The visibility of the Saberi case could easily flare up into a full grown diplomatic feud. So far, Secretary Clinton’s language has been measured, though concerned.
Might the internet play a constructive role here in changing the diplomatic end game by raising the heat on Iranian authorities? Imagine, it was years before Solzhenitsin could get The Gulag Archipelago published in the West, much less in the Soviet Union. Now, despite all the Iranians’ best efforts at a low key and hack job political trial, anyone with Google can learn the inner workings of Saberi’s detention and moreover Iran’s infamous Evin political prison where she’s being held.
While — as AbuAardvark and NetEffect’s Evgeny Morozov have been right to point out — the internet is not radically democraticizing the world, it does raise the embarassment and diplomatic costs of political prisoners. Hard to complain you’ve been shut out of the community of nations when your injustice is plainly on display. And the web is what solves this informational assymetry, even if it can’t shake kings and autocrats.
Saberi’s partner, Kurdish-Iranian filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi, has written an open letter appealing to Iranian authorities. The letter can be read in full here and is circulating on numerous media outlets and websites (BBC, Campaign for Human Rights in Iran to name a few).
US civil rights activist Jesse Jackson plans to visit Iran to push for the release of jailed US-Iranian journalist Roxana Saberi.
“We have applied for visas today and we hope we will be granted entry, and if so we want to make a humanitarian plea, a moral appeal to gain the release of the journalist,” he said on a visit to Malaysia.
Saberi, 31, was sentenced to eight years' imprisonment last week by an Iranian revolutionary court that convicted her of spying for the United States.
In an unprecedented move on Sunday, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for “justice” for Saberi and said she should be given the right to defend herself.
Jackson said no date had been set yet for his mission, which he said would complement the appeals already made by US President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
“I hope the Iranian leadership will accept our mercy appeal and let her go,” he said, urging Malaysians to use any connections with Iran, a fellow Muslim nation.
“If you have access to a voice in Iran, whether religious or political, join with us in making a plea to release that young woman from prison,” he said.
Jackson, who has been involved in US hostage negotiations in the past, is in Malaysia to address a peace conference.
Jailed Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi has appealed against her eight-year sentence for spying against Iran, the official IRNA news agency said on Tuesday.
Saberi, 31, was sentenced on Saturday on charges of spying for the United States, in a verdict that could complicate Washington's efforts towards reconciliation with the Islamic Republic after three decades of mutual mistrust."Saberi has appealed and I hope that the appeal court will change the verdict," IRNA quoted judiciary spokesman Alireza Jamshidi as saying.
EU states are split on whether to follow a US-Australian boycott of a controversial UN conference on racism in Geneva, where Iran's president is expected to launch a verbal onslaught on Israel.
Germany became the latest country to announce it would not be attending the five-day Durban Review Conference, joining Australia, Canada, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands and the US.
But it did hold out the possibility of joining the event later in the week.
France, on the other hand, will attend, said a source close to President Nicolas Sarkozy's office.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad arrived in Geneva Sunday, one of the few heads of state attending.
Mr Ahmadinejad, who has called for Israel to be “wiped off the map” and questioned the Holocaust as a “myth”, is to address the gathering later today.
Earlier yesterday, Mr Ahmadinejad, who is seeking re-election in June, was quoted by Iran's state broadcaster as saying “the Zionist ideology and regime are the flag bearers of racism”.
Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Yossi Levy denounced the event as a “tragic farce.”
The Geneva meeting is meant to take stock of progress in fighting racial discrimination, xenophobia and intolerance since the controversial World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, eight years ago.
But Mr Levy said: “Officially it is aimed at denouncing racism, but it has invited a Holocaust denier who has called for the destruction of Israel.”
Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said they could not be sure the conference would be used “as a platform to air offensive views, including anti-Semitic views.”
US President Barack Obama said anti-Israeli language that was “oftentimes completely hypocritical and counterproductive” in the draft final communique had been the red line for his administration.
European Union governments were divided over whether or not to attend.
Belgium called for countries to attend after the Netherlands vowed to stay away because it feared the event would be abused “for political ends and attacks on the West.”
Britain, while expressing reservations, said it still intended to attend.
And a source close to Mr Sarkozy's office said: “France will go to Geneva... in order to articulate its standpoint on human rights issues.”
But Italy has confirmed its withdrawal.
The Paris-based European Jewish Congress kept up the pressure, calling on all EU states to boycott the event. Mr Ahmadinejad's presence meant the United Nations had “put the fox in charge of the hen house,” said EJC president Moshe Kantor.
The Simon Wiesenthal Centre, an international Jewish human rights group, specifically called on Germany to pull out.
Germany will be staying away _ at least at first.
Their concern was that the conference would be “hijacked for other interests, as was the case with the previous one in 2001,” said Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier.
Germany would be “a very attentive observer” when the conference got under way, he said, and he did not rule out their “returning to active participation a little later.”
Swiss President Hans-Rudolf Merz met Mr Ahmadinejad in Geneva late yesterday, his office said and raised the issue of jailed US-Iranian journalist Roxana Saberi.
Switzerland has been representing US consular interests in Iran since Tehran and Washington broke off diplomatic relations in 1980.
Ms Saberi was sentenced by an Iranian revolutionary court to eight years in jail on charges of spying for the US during a closed-door trial, in a verdict unveiled at the weekend.
The meeting took place despite Israel's attempts to talk Mr Merz out of it.
Monday, as well as being the anniversary of Adolf Hitler's birth, also marks the start of Holocaust commemoration events, including a ceremony in Geneva attended by leading Jewish figures including Nobel peace laureate Elie Wiesel.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, said she was “shocked and deeply disappointed” by Washington's decision to stay away.
Campaigners Human Rights Watch said the boycotting states were “turning their backs” on victims of racism.
Roxana Saberi with former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami
April 20,
TEHRAN: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called last night for fair treatment of US journalist Roxana Saberi, who has been convicted of spying and sentenced to eight years in prison by Iran's Revolutionary Court.
In a rare intervention in judicial proceedings, Mr Ahmadinejad said the Tehran prosecutor should examine the cases against Saberi and Hossein Derakhshan, an Iranian-Canadian blogger who has been behind bars since November.
"At the President's insistence, you must do what is needed to secure justice ... in examining these people's charges," said a letter from the President's chief of staff, Abdolreza Sheikholeslami, to prosecutor Saeed Mortazavi. "Take care that the defendants have all the legal freedoms and rights to defend themselves against the charges."
Saberi, 31, a former American beauty queen, has been in detention in Tehran's notorious Evin prison since January 31. She was charged with espionage this month and tried last week behind closed doors.
Derakhshan has been detained since his arrival in Iran in November last year and is being investigated on charges of insulting Shia imams.
US President Barack Obama, who has called for dialogue with Iran since he took office in January, was "deeply disappointed" at Saberi's sentence.
Saberi holds both American and Iranian citizenship, but she travelled to Iran on her Iranian passport and this puts her under Iran's jurisdiction. Her sentence on Saturday marks the first time an Iranian-American journalist has been convicted of espionage in Iran.
Saberi, whose freelance work has appeared on National Public Radio, the BBC, Fox News and CBS, initially told her parents she was arrested for buying a bottle of wine. Purchasing alcohol is illegal in Iran.
Iranian officials said last week Saberi had confessed to charges of passing information to US intelligence agents. But her father, Reza Saberi, told US radio on Saturday his daughter had been "tricked" into a confession and said she told him the investigators promised her a release if she co-operated.
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TEHRAN, Iran — Iran said Monday it would try three Americans jailed since crossing the border from Iraq in July, a step certain to aggravate the U.S. at a time when Tehran is locked in a standoff with the West over its nuclear program.
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