Iran will allow the mothers of three Americans arrested along the Iraqi border in July to visit them in a Tehran prison, the foreign minister announced on Monday, saying the decision was made on humanitarian grounds.
It was the first positive signal from Iran in a case that has exacerbated tensions between the two countries that were already high due to the standoff over Iran’s accelerating nuclear program and criticism of its crackdown on post-election protesters.
During their nine months in jail, Iran has accused the Americans of espionage, but has not brought them to trial or even made clear if formal charges have been filed. In February, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad proposed swapping them for Iranians he says are jailed in the US, raising fears that the three are being held as bargaining chips.
Adding to concerns, Swiss diplomats who were allowed to visit the Americans on April 22 reported that two of them were in poor health, according to their families.
Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said on state TV late on Monday that the Iranian government has ordered visas for the prisoners’ mothers to be issued on humanitarian grounds.
Iran has accused Shane Bauer, Sarah Shourd and Josh Fattal of illegal border crossing, spying and having links to US intelligence and has said they would be brought to trial. Their families and the US government have denied the spying accusations and called for their release.
The families of the three graduates of the University of California at Berkeley say they were hiking in the scenic Kurdistan region of northern Iraq and that if they did cross the border with Iran they did so unintentionally.
Mottaki said Iran made a decision to grant visas to the mothers before Ahmadinejad attended a conference to review the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in New York this month.
The mothers flew to New York in hopes of meeting Ahmadinejad to make a personal appeal for their children’s release, but their request to see him wasn’t granted.
“Before the New York meeting, we decided on humanitarian grounds that these three mothers can visit their children,” Mottaki said on a live TV show. “We gave orders to our mission in the US [to issue the visas]. They can refer to our mission, get it [visas] and come.”
He did not clarify where the visas would be issued, but it could be at Iran’s UN mission in New York. The Pakistani embassy in Washington also represents Iranian diplomatic interests in the US in the absence of an official relationship between the two countries.
The three mothers said on Monday they were excited to hear the news, but did not want to count on making the trip until they got official word that they could pick up the visas.
“Yes we are excited, yes we are delighted at movement, delighted to think we will travel there,” said Laura Fattal of suburban Philadelphia, the mother of Josh Fattal. “But we haven’t got the word yet ourselves to come pick up those visas. We’re in a truly holding our breath situation. We will leave the minute we have those visas.”
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
Cook Islands officials yesterday said they had discussed seabed minerals research with China as the small Pacific island mulls deep-sea mining of its waters. The self-governing country of 17,000 people — a former colony of close partner New Zealand — has licensed three companies to explore the seabed for nodules rich in metals such as nickel and cobalt, which are used in electric vehicle (EV) batteries. Despite issuing the five-year exploration licenses in 2022, the Cook Islands government said it would not decide whether to harvest the potato-sized nodules until it has assessed environmental and other impacts. Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
STEADFAST DART: The six-week exercise, which involves about 10,000 troops from nine nations, focuses on rapid deployment scenarios and multidomain operations NATO is testing its ability to rapidly deploy across eastern Europe — without direct US assistance — as Washington shifts its approach toward European defense and the war in Ukraine. The six-week Steadfast Dart 2025 exercises across Bulgaria, Romania and Greece are taking place as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine approaches the three-year mark. They involve about 10,000 troops from nine nations and represent the largest NATO operation planned this year. The US absence from the exercises comes as European nations scramble to build greater military self-sufficiency over their concerns about the commitment of US President Donald Trump’s administration to common defense and