U.S. decries detentions by Iran

Thu., May 10, 2007

Robin Wright Washington Post

Ahmadinejad rival re-elected

» TEHRAN, Iran – The moderate-leaning mayor of Iran's capital was re-elected Wednesday in a city council vote that may signal waning support for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

» Mayor Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf is considered a likely rival to Ahmadinejad in the 2009 presidential election. The mayor is a conservative who backs the Islamic government, but he is also a pragmatist stressing efficiency over hard-line ideology.

» Tehran city council members were under pressure from the government not to vote for Qalibaf, said Mohsen Mirdamadi, the leader of Iran's largest reformist party. But in Wednesday's vote, Qalibaf won with the backing of eight of the council's 15 members.

Associated Press

WASHINGTON – The State Department on Wednesday condemned Iran’s detention of Washington scholar Haleh Esfandiari and journalist Parnaz Azima and acknowledged a growing problem with Tehran over its actions against U.S. and dual U.S.-Iranian citizens.

“We want to see them returned back to their families,” said State Department spokesman Sean McCormack. “These two women are an academic on the one hand, a journalist on the other. These people don’t pose any threat to the Iranian regime.

“They are both grandmothers and so I am not sure what it is the Iranian government has to fear from these ladies,” he added.

McCormack also said that both women symbolize the kind of “people to people” interaction the United States wants to encourage.

McCormack said arresting Esfandiari, co-director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center of Scholars, and confiscating the passport of Azima, a Radio Farda correspondent, offers “an insight into the nature of this regime.” Esfandiari was detained Tuesday; Azima’s passport was confiscated in January. Both women were in Iran visiting sick mothers.

In Tehran, Esfandiari’s 93-year-old mother went to notorious Evin Prison to try to visit her daughter but was turned away, according to Esfandiari’s husband, George Mason University professor Shaul Bakhash.

A hard-line news agency in Iran charged Tuesday that Esfandiari was head of the Iran section of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which family members and the Woodrow Wilson Center said is not true.

Meanwhile, the wife of former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who went missing after he flew to Iran’s Kish Island on March 8, met with senior State Department officials Tuesday to bring more pressure on the U.S. government, according to a family member who asked not to be identified because of ongoing diplomatic efforts. Levinson’s wife, Christine, also released a copy of the letter she wrote to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appealing for him to help find and release her husband.

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U.S. decries detentions by Iran

Jesse Tinsley

Jim Meehan

Molly Quinn

Rob Curley

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