When Siamak Namazi traveled to Tehran in the summer of 2015, Iran had just signed a landmark nuclear deal and the government was encouraging expatriates to return home and bring their expertise and dollars.
So the 51-year-old Iranian American businessman flew from his home in Dubai to visit his parents and attend a funeral in Iran.
But he was arrested and charged with “collaborating with a hostile government” — an allusion to the United States — and eventually became the longest-held American citizen that Iran has acknowledged imprisoning. In January, he went on a hunger strike for seven days to bring attention to his ordeal.
On Thursday Mr. Namazi, along with four other dual national Iranian Americans, became part of a prisoner swap deal between Iran and the U.S.
“I’ve been a hostage for seven and half years — that’s six times the duration of the hostage crisis,” Mr. Namazi said in an interview from prison in March with CNN, referring to the American embassy staff who were taken hostage in Iran during the 1979 revolution and held for 444 days. “We’ve been taken for one reason and one reason only — and that’s because we’re U.S. citizens.”
In exchange for releasing the Americans, the U.S. agreed to release five Iranians jailed for violating sanctions against Iran, and to release about $6 billion of Iran’s frozen assets being held in South Korea. The money will be transferred to a bank account in Qatar and can only be used by Iran for humanitarian purposes, such as paying for medicine and medical equipment.
The ordeal for the Americans being held in Iran is hardly over. Iran’s foreign ministry said the five will be allowed to board a plane out of Iran only when the money lands in the Qatari bank account. For now, they have been released from prison and remain under house arrest at a Tehran hotel.
The other American prisoners include Emad Sharghi, 58, a businessman sentenced in 2020 to 10 years in prison on spying charges; and Morad Tahbaz, 68, a British-born businessman and wildlife conservationist who was arrested in 2018 and sentenced to 10 years on charges of “contacts with the U.S. government.”
The U.S. government has not named the other two prisoners, citing their families’ requests that they remain anonymous. One is a businessman from California who was detained nearly a year ago, and the other is a woman who worked for nongovernment organizations in Afghanistan and was arrested in 2023, according to people familiar with the deal and Iranian media reports.
Mr. Namazi grew up all around the world and has a master’s degree from the London Business School. He comes from a well-known family from the city of Shiraz in central Iran, where a major hospital is named after them. Mr. Namazi had traveled back and forth to Iran and had lived in Tehran, working at a family-run consulting company.
He became an expert on Iran’s economy, markets and inevitably the politics that overshadow all sectors in Iran. He studied…
2023-08-11 20:13:04
Article from www.nytimes.com