AP News, August 13th, 2007
Judicial officials have wrapped up their investigation of two Iranian-American academics accused of conspiring to destabilize Iran, but no decision has been reached on whether to put the prisoners on trial, a top prosecutor said.
"Investigation into Haleh Esfandiari and Kian Tajbakhsh is over," Tehran Deputy Prosecutor Hasan Haddad said late Sunday, according to the official IRNA news agency.
He said no decision on a possible trial would be made until the two scholars completed "some written work" that he did not describe.
The two, whose plight has added to U.S.-Iranian tensions, have been detained since May in Tehran's Evin prison, notorious for its harsh conditions for political prisoners.
Esfandiari, director of the Middle East program at the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and Tajbakhsh, an urban planning consultant with the Soros Foundation's Open Society Institute, are accused of endangering Iran's national security.
Iranian public television ran video last month in which Esfandiari said a network of foreign activists was trying to destabilize Iran and bring about "essential" social change. Tajbakhsh said in the video that his group tried to create a "gap between the government and the nation."
Both the Wilson Center and the Open Society Institute have criticized the Iranian government for the broadcast and dismissed the statements as "coerced."
Iran has often been criticized for forcing some detainees to incriminate themselves publicly on TV.
Two other Iranian-Americans also face security-related charges: Parnaz Azima, a journalist for U.S.-funded Radio Farda, and Ali Shakeri, a founding board member of the Center for Citizen Peacebuilding at the University of California, Irvine. Shakeri is in prison, while Azima is free but barred from leaving Iran.
The detentions have become another point of contention in the tensions between the U.S. and Iran, joining Washington's accusations that Iran arms Shiite Muslim militants in Iraq, fuels unrest in Lebanon and seeks to develop nuclear weapons. Tehran denies those claims, and blames Washington for Iraq's instability.
