Tehran, April 20: The father of Shahrzad Mir-Qolikhan, an innocent Iranian woman imprisoned in the United States for three years, says her daughter has been transferred to a prison in the state of Oklahoma.
“Shahrzad has been finally transferred to a prison in the state of Oklahoma today, while in suspense for days, awaiting her transit,” her father told Fars news agency on Wednesday.
He added that the US government removed Shahrzad from her previous prison and held her in transit after people and media voiced their support for her.
Mr. Mir-Qolikhan emphasized that Shahrzad had been continuously threatened to death and suffered respiratory diseases due to heavy pollution.
“If necessary measures had been taken for the release of my daughter from the very beginning of her arrest, she could have spent the Iranian New Year holiday with us and her twins,” he said.
Shahrzad Mir-Qolikhan was arrested in the US in December 2007, after being forced to return to the States from a vacation in Cyprus. She has been permitted brief phone calls to her family in Iran — twin daughters and their grandparents — during her three-year imprisonment.
Her former husband, Mahmoud Seif, had allegedly tried to export night-vision goggles to Iran from Austria.
However, she was detained and sentenced to five years in prison by a Florida federal court in the absence of her husband.
Shahrzad said that she had suffered brutal torture in US prisons.
Tehran has repeatedly slammed the case as an example of human rights violation in the United States, demanding the release of the 33-year-old Iranian national.
On January 3, Iran’s Foreign Ministry summoned the Swiss envoy over the US inhumane treatment of Mir-Qolikhan, demanding an explanation from US officials regarding reports about her situation.
Ahead of the new Iranian calendar year, Shahrzad’s two daughters pleaded for their mother’s release.
“New Year is when all families gather together in peace and love and enjoy and celebrate the New Year. We two would like that. We want our mother to be freed from jail [so that she can] come and celebrate the New Year with us like all the other children and families in the world,” Melika and Melina Mir-Qolikhan said in a video massage broadcast by Press TV on December 28.
“Our dear mother is innocent and we would like to celebrate this very special event with her. We would like to ask all the people in the world [and] all the children to help us by writing letters to [US President] Mr. [Barack] Obama,” the twins added.
——–Agencies