WarSclerotic

A prominent American anchorwoman on Iranian state television has been arrested by the FBI during a visit to the U.S., the broadcaster reported Wednesday, and her son said she was being held in a prison, apparently as a material witness.

Marzieh Hashemi, who worked for Press TV’s English-language service, was detained in St. Louis, where she had filmed a Black Lives Matter documentary after visiting relatives in the New Orleans area. She was then taken to Washington, according to her elder son, Hossein Hashemi.

The FBI said in an email that it had no comment on the arrest of the woman who was born Melanie Franklin in New Orleans and has worked for Iran’s state television network for 25 years.

Hossein Hashemi said his mother lives in Tehran and comes back to this country about once a year to see her family, usually scheduling documentary work somewhere in the U.S., as well.

“We still have no idea what’s going on,” said Hashemi, a research fellow at the University of Colorado who was interviewed by phone from Washington. He also said he and his siblings had been subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury.

The incident comes as Iran faces increasing criticism of its own arrests of dual citizens and other people with Western ties. Those cases have previously been used as bargaining chips in negotiations with world powers.

Federal law allows judges to order witnesses to be arrested and detained if the government can prove their testimony has extraordinary value for a criminal case and that they would be a flight risk and unlikely to respond to a subpoena. The statute generally requires those witnesses to be promptly released once they are deposed.

Marzieh Hashemi, an American citizen, had not been contacted by the FBI before she was detained and would “absolutely” have been willing to cooperate with the agency, her son said.

Asked whether his mother had been involved in any criminal activity or knew anyone who might be implicated in a crime, Hashemi said, “We don’t have any information along those lines.”

Hashemi said his mother was arrested as she was about to board a flight from St. Louis to Denver. A spokesman for St. Louis Lambert International Airport declined to comment and referred questions to the FBI.

The constitutionality of the material witness law has “never been meaningfully tested,” said Ricardo J. Bascuas, a professor at the University of Miami School of Law. “The government only relies on it when they need a reason to arrest somebody but they don’t have one.”

No matter the reason for Marzieh Hashemi’s detention, she should have been granted a court appearance by now, Bascuas said.

She apparently was unable to call her daughter until Tuesday night. The family is trying to hire an attorney, but it has been difficult because she has not been charged with a crime, her son said.

AP

Iran’s state broadcaster held a news conference and launched a hashtag campaign for Hashemi, using the same techniques families with loved ones held in the Islamic Republic use to highlight their cases.

“We will not spare any legal action” to help her, said Paiman Jebeli, deputy chief of Iran’s state IRIB broadcaster. Iran’s Press TV aired footage of her anchoring news programs and discussing the war in Syria, set to dramatic music.

There were no references to any case against Hashemi in U.S. federal courts, nor in Missouri.

Hashemi describes herself online as having studied journalism at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. She converted to Islam in 1982 at age 22 after meeting Iranian activist students in Denver.

She married a man she met while in journalism school. They had two sons and a daughter. Her husband is dead, said Hashemi’s brother, Milton Leroy Franklin of the New Orleans suburb of Metairie.

At least four other American citizens are being held in Iran, including Iranian-American Siamak Namazi and his 82-year-old father, Baquer, both serving 10-year sentences on espionage charges. Iranian-American art dealer Karan Vafadari and his Iranian wife, Afarin Neyssari, received 27-year and 16-year prison sentences, respectively. Chinese-American graduate student Xiyue Wang was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Also in an Iranian prison is Nizar Zakka, a permanent U.S. resident from Lebanon who advocated for internet freedom and has done work for the U.S. government. He was sentenced to 10 years on espionage-related charges.

Former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who vanished in Iran in 2007 while on an unauthorized CIA mission, remains missing as well. Iran says that Levinson is not in the country and that it has no further information about him. His family holds Tehran responsible for his disappearance.

The Al-Qaida-linked Somali terrorist group Al-Shabaab is claiming responsibility for a bombing in Nairobi this week that killed at least 21 people. Al-Shabaab says that the attack was a response to U.S. President Donald Trump recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel in December 2017.

Nineteen people remain unaccounted for two days after the bombing, which targeted a hotel complex in Nairobi, the Red Cross said on Thursday, raising the possibility of a considerably higher death toll.

In a two-page statement claiming responsibility for the attack, Al-Shabaab did not spell out why it had chosen to hit Kenya over Trump’s decision on Jerusalem.

It said the attack was “a response to the witless remarks of U.S. president, Donald Trump, and his declaration,” and that it was targeting “Western and Zionist interests worldwide and in support of our Muslim families in Palestine.”

Asked about the claim, a White House National Security Council spokesman said in a statement: “This senseless act is a stark reminder of why the United States remains resolved in our fight to defeat radical Islamist terrorism.”

Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta said on Wednesday evening that a 20-hour siege had ended with security forces killing all the Somali terrorists who had stormed the hotel complex, driving hundreds of people into terrifying escapes.

Kenya, the East African hub for multinational companies and the United Nations, became a frequent target for Al-Shabaab after Kenya sent troops into neighboring Somalia in 2011 to try to create a buffer zone along its border.

Sixteen Kenyans including a policeman, an American survivor of the World Trade Center bombing, and a British development worker were among the dead in the hotel complex, Nairobi Police Chief Joseph Boinnet said.

Israeli television said on Wednesday that U.S. President Donald Trump’s Middle East peace plan would propose a Palestinian state on as much as 90% of the West Bank, with a capital in east Jerusalem – but not including holy sites in the Old City.

The White House, which has kept details of the plan under wraps and said its release could still be months away, dismissed the report by Israel’s Reshet 13 TV as inaccurate speculation.

Citing what it said was a source briefed by the Americans, the television report said the plan would entail Israel annexing Jewish settlement blocs in the West Bank while isolated settlements would either be evacuated or their construction halted.

Trump wants the proposed Israeli moves to be supplemented by territorial swaps with the Palestinians, and for east Jerusalem’s walled Old City – site of major Jewish, Muslim and Christian shrines – to be under Israeli sovereignty but jointly managed along with the Palestinians and Jordan, the report said.

The report said “most Arab neighborhoods” in east Jerusalem would be under Palestinian sovereignty as a future capital.

The report made no mention of the fate of Palestinian refugees, another core dispute in the decades-old conflict, or of how the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip might fit into the plan.

Israeli and Palestinian officials did not immediately respond to the report.

Trump’s Middle East peace envoy Jason Greenblatt, a main architect of the plan along with the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, said in a message on Twitter that the report “is not accurate.” He did not specify, however, what in the report was incorrect.

“Speculation about the content of the plan is not helpful Very few people on the planet know what is in it … for now,” Greenblatt wrote. “Peddling false, distorted or biased stories to the media is irresponsible & harmful to the process.”

In separate remarks to reporters, Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon predicted that the Trump plan would not be released before the Knesset election on April 9.

“From what we understand, it will not be presented before the election,” Danon said. “It’s a smart decision because we don’t want it to become the issue of the elections.”