US deports Iran scientist after judged innocent
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Iranian scientist Sirous Asgari, who was jailed in the US but acquitted in a federal trade secrets case, has been deported, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said yesterday in an Instagram post.
“Congratulations to his wife and his esteemed family,” Zarif wrote. State-run IRNA later reported the news, citing Zarif.
Asgari, a professor at Iran’s Sharif University of Technology, had been indicted in April 2016, accused by US federal prosecutors of trying to steal secret research from Case Western Reserve University. The Cleveland school had been working on a project for the US Navy Office of Naval Research to create and produce anti-corrosive stainless steel.
Asgari was acquitted in November.
Ken Cuccinelli, the acting deputy Homeland Security secretary, said the DHS had started to try to deport Asgari on December 12 following his acquittal, but Iran refused to recognize him as Iranian and provide him with a valid passport until late February.
Once Asgari received the passport, DHS made several attempts to fly him back to Iran, purchasing tickets for flights on March 10, March 18, March 23, April 1 and May 1, according to Cuccinelli, however, each of those flights was canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Asgari’s supporters told The Guardian newspaper in April he had contracted the coronavirus while imprisoned. He had been held at Louisiana’s Winn Correctional Center by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement before his deportation.
Iranian officials had associated Asgari’s release with US prisoners held in Iran potentially being freed, something Cuccinelli strongly disputed.
Among the US citizens held in Iran is US Navy veteran Michael White. White was detained in July 2018 while visiting a girlfriend in Iran. He was convicted of insulting Iran’s supreme leader and posting private information online.
He was released from prison in March on a medical furlough that required him to remain in the country in the care of the Swiss Embassy in Tehran, which represents America’s interests in Iran.
White is among tens of thousands of prisoners granted medical furloughs by Iran, which was one of the first countries to be hit hard by the spread of the novel coronavirus.
In December, Iran released a Princeton University scholar held for three years espionage charges in exchange for the release of a detained Iranian scientist in the US.
In March, the family of former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who vanished in Iran 13 years ago on an unauthorized CIA mission, said they had been informed by US officials that they had determined that Levinson was probably dead. They have not elaborated on how they made that determination.
The release comes as the US under President Donald Trump continues a maximum-pressure campaign targeting Iran after unilaterally withdrawing from Tehran’s nuclear deal with world powers in May 2018. In the time since, the two countries have seen a series of escalating incidents, including the US drone strike killing an Iranian general in Baghdad and an Iranian ballistic missile attack targeting American troops in Iraq.
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