In a decision handed down late last week and reported to the public on Monday, U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly ordered the government of Iran to pay $107 million in compensatory damages, plus $1.3 billion in punitive damages, to the family of former FBI agent Robert Levinson.
Tehran — Iran said on Thursday it had “no knowledge” of the whereabouts of a former FBI agent missing since 2007, after his family said he had died in Iranian custody.
The family of Robert Levinson, the former FBI agent who disappeared in Iran in 2007 and has been held illegally by the regime since then despite numerous pleas for his release, said on Wednesday that U.S. officials believe he “died while in Iranian custody,” sometime prior to the deadly outbreak of the Wuhan coronavirus in Iran.
U.S. Navy veteran Michael White, imprisoned by the Iranian regime for over a year, was granted humanitarian parole on Thursday due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The Iranian government on Tuesday ordered the temporary release of more than 54,000 prisoners, representing about 20 percent of its imprisoned population, to slow the spread of the coronavirus in its notoriously overcrowded and unsanitary jails. The released detainees include some of the regime’s political prisoners, possibly including British-Iranian dual citizen Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who apparently did contract the virus during her stint at Iran’s horrifying Evin prison.
Iran indicated Monday it wants to swap more prisoners with the United States following the release of Iranian scientist Masoud Soleimani, traded for Chinese-American scholar Xiyue Wang, a graduate student at Princeton.
A bipartisan group of Florida lawmakers want Iran to fulfill its promise to assist in finding Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent who disappeared in Iran 12 years ago.
In a statement released on Friday, the White House said it was “prepared to impose new and serious consequences on Iran unless all unjustly imprisoned American citizens are released and returned.”
The family of a former FBI agent who disappeared while on a business trip in Iran a decade ago filed a lawsuit on March 21 demanding damages for the abduction and torture of their relative.
Daniel Levinson, son of former FBI agent Robert Levinson, is hopeful that President Trump can bring his father home after 10 years missing in Iran.
An Iranian court has sentenced Golamreza “Robin” Shahini, a dual American-Iranian citizen from San Diego, to 18 years in prison for allegedly “collaborating with a foreign government” and for Facebook posts.
Forgotten in President Obama’s characteristically America-humbling hostage deal with Iran was ex-FBI agent Robert Levinson, last seen at an Iranian resort in 2007 while working as a CIA contractor.
Iran State TV station FARS announced Saturday morning that four American dual-nationality prisoners were released from Iranian custody in a “prisoner swap” with the United States.
Kidnapped American Robert Levinson’s son Daniel penned an op-ed for the Washington Post over the weekend, in which he warned those who would visit Iran in pursuit of business opportunities created by the nuclear deal to exercise extreme caution. “My family and I cannot emphasize enough how dangerous traveling to Iran remains,” Daniel Levinson wrote.
Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton’s campaign offered public support to the cause of freeing American hostages in Iran.
On November 4, 1979, Muslim student revolutionaries in the Islamic Republic of Iran took over the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and with it claimed 52 American citizens as hostages in what became a 444-day ordeal that would go on to grip America and the world.
Iran has taken another American citizen captive. On Tuesday, Iran’s state-owned IRIB news network announced that the regime had arrested Nizar Ahmad Zakka, a Lebanese-American from Riverside, California with alleged “deep ties” to the U.S. military and intelligence services on suspicion of espionage.
His case is as stifling as it is mysterious. American citizen Robert Levinson, a former FBI and DEA agent, was taken hostage by Iranian intelligence officials on March 9, 2007, while on a private business trip to Iran’s Kish Island, where he was seeking information about cigarette smuggling.
As the White House hails a breakthrough in its diplomatic effort to curb Iran’s nuclear program, several under-reported facts cast a shadow over any real, or imagined, success. President Obama’s assurance that “every pathway to a nuclear weapon is cut off” for Iran flies in the face of reality.
