Iran announced on Wednesday that it arrested another American-Iranian visitor, the same day that a parliamentary committee investigated whether dual nationals are being recruited as spies, Reuters reported.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps detained the individual in the Golestan province in late July. The American-Iranian was charged with “cooperation with countries hostile to Iran, acting against national security, and having links with anti-revolutionary elements and media,” according to Iran’s Tasnim News Agency.
News of the person’s arrest was publicized on the same day that the Iranian parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy committee met with members of the IRGC’s intelligence service. At the meeting, which was dubbed “the infiltration project,” legislators and intelligence agents discussed the threat posed by dual nationals who they claimed could be recruited as spies by foreign powers.
“In this meeting it was brought up that dual-nationals are under the serious scrutiny of the enemies’ intelligence services and they are used in the infiltration project,” Hussein Naqavi Husseini, a spokesman for the committee, said on Iranian state television. He added that an unnamed dual national who served on Iran’s nuclear negotiating team was under investigation.
Iran’s judiciary announced earlier this week that a member of the negotiating team was arrested and released on bail. Hamid Baidinejad, a nuclear negotiator, defended his colleague Abdul Rasoul Durri Esfahani on social media, writing, “Insisting that he is a spy is an open insult to the intelligence and security services of Iran,” Reuters reported.
Baidinejad’s defense seems to confirm earlier reports that Durri Esfahani, a dual national who negotiated banking related aspects of the nuclear deal, was the team member being investigated.
Reuters reported in July that the six dual nationals arrested in recent months comprised “the highest number of Iranians with dual-nationality detained at one time in recent years to have been acknowledged.”
Other dual nationals currently detained in Iran include British-Iranian citizen Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, an employee of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, who was forcibly separated from her toddler daughter as they prepared to leave Tehran in April; Homa Hoodfar, a Canadian-Iranian scholar who was arrested earlier this year when she returned to Iran to see her family and has recently been hospitalized; American-Iranian businessman Siamak Namazi and his father, Baquer Namazi; British-Iranian businessman Kamal Foroughi; and Nizar Zakka, a Lebanese national with U.S. permanent residency.
[Photo: سبزفوتو Iran / Flickr ]