Dual US-Iranian citizen Siamak Namazi, who has been held captive in Iran since 2015, pleaded with President Joe Biden for his release in a recent interview.
Speaking to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour by phone from Iran’s Evin prison, Namazi, the country’s longest-serving U.S. detainee, said he was willing to take the risk of speaking to the network to directly tell the reality he faced.
“I’m still concerned that the White House doesn’t appreciate what our situation is,” Namazi said.
Namazi spoke directly to Biden during the interview, saying he was hurt that the president had not met with his family after more than two years in office.
“I am asking you, sir, to put the lives and liberties of innocent Americans above all the politics involved and just do what is necessary to end this nightmare and bring us home,” Namazi said.
He described agreeing to the CNN interview as a “desperate move.”
Namazi was arrested in October 2015 while in Iran on business. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison on charges of espionage and “collaboration with a hostile Government,” a reference to the US.
The US dismissed the allegations as false, and the UN concluded Namazi’s arrest was “arbitrary.”
He went on a seven-day hunger strike in January and wrote an op-ed for The New York Times last year in which he rejected Biden’s strategy on Americans imprisoned in Iran.
Namazi, Morad Tahbaz and Emad Shargi are three US citizens who are currently being held in Evin prison. Namazi said he would like to see them all released at the same time.
“We are all in this together and I hope this solution can be found for all of us,” Namazi said.
Namazi has not been included in three separate prisoner exchanges the US has negotiated with Iran since he was first arrested, including a 2016 prisoner swap brokered by President Barack Obama’s administration after the Iran nuclear deal.
“Obviously when it happened, I was really broken, broken and sad,” Namazi said. “One day, I realized that everyone was gone, and I was left, I was left alone.”
President Donald Trump’s administration struck a deal with Tehran in 2019 and 2020, but Namazi was not among the released prisoners.
State Department spokesman Ned Price called Iran’s practice of using prisoners to be used as political pawns “cruel.”
“We will always stand up for the rights of citizens who have been wrongfully detained, and that certainly includes Siamak Namazi,” Price told reporters this week.
“Senior officials from this building as well as from the White House meet and consult regularly with the Namazi family and will continue to do so until this wrongful and unacceptable detention is brought to an end,” Price added.