“All I want sir, is one minute of your days’ time for the next seven days devoted to thinking about the tribulations of the U.S. hostages in Iran. Just a single minute of your time for each year of my life that I lost in Evin prison after the USG could have saved me but didn’t,” Iranian-American national Siamak Namazi said in a strongly worded message to Biden released by the detainee’s lawyer.
The 51-year-old Namazi has been in Iranian prisons since October 2015. In February 2016, Namazi’s father Baquer Namazi, a former UNICEF official, was arrested when he traveled to Iran to urge the release of his son. Both men were sentenced to ten years on espionage charges, however Baquer Namazi was released last year on medical leave, while his son remained in Tehran’s infamous Evin prison.
“Alas, given I am in this cage all I have to offer you in return is my additional suffering. Therefore, I will deny myself food for the same seven days, in the hope that by doing so you won’t deny me this small request,” Namazi concluded in his letter, urging the US government to take immediate action.
Namazi’s message comes seven years after the release of five other Americans when Tehran and Washington agreed on the nuclear deal, a prisoner swap Namazi was excluded from.
There are a number of dual and foreign nationals being held in Iranian prisons on charges of spying for foreign governments with rights groups accusing Tehran of using them as bargaining chips to gain concessions from world powers.
Iran on Saturday announced that they had carried out the death sentence of Iranian-British national Alireza Akbari on charges of spying for the UK’s intelligence agency and threatening Tehran’s national security.
In its annual world report on global rights conditions published on Thursday, Human Rights Watch (HRW) slammed Iran for conducting unfair trials and obtaining confessions under duress, as well as for charges brought against dual nationals.
“Iranian courts, and particularly revolutionary courts, regularly fall far short of providing fair trials and use confessions likely obtained under torture as evidence in court,” the report read.
“The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) Intelligence Organization continued to arrest Iranian dual and foreign nationals on vague charges such as “cooperating with a hostile state,” it added.
