“News reports that the Iranian authorities have charged Roxana Saberi with espionage are deeply worrying,” said the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) Middle East and North Africa Program Coordinator Mohamed Abdel Dayem in a statement. He added that Saberi has been openly working as a journalist in Iran for several years until 2006 for major media organizations including National Public Radio, the British Broadcasting Corporation, ABC News, and others.
Saberi is 31 years old and a dual citizen of the U.S. and Iran. She was initially detained in January, and told her family that she was being held for buying a bottle of wine.
According to a report by the Associated Press, Saberi’s lawyer, Abdolsamad Khorramshahi, said she has been told of the espionage charge against her and he plans to request that she be released on bail until the trial.
A spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry said after her initial detention in January that Saberi was detained for reporting without proper accreditation.
An investigating judge said that Saberi will stand trial by next week, AP reported.
Saberi is being detained in the city of Tehran in the notorious Evin Prison, which is often used for jailing political prisoners.
According to the CPJ, at least two journalists have died at Evin Prison in the past six years under suspicious circumstances. Omidreza Mirsayafi, a blogger who was serving a 30-month sentence for insulting religious figures, died there this month. In 2003, Iranian-Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi died from a brain hemorrhage after being beaten in the prison.
More than 10,000 people internationally have signed a CPJ petition of concern about Saberi’s detention, which was presented to the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations in New York. Her parents, Reza and Akiko Saberi, recently traveled from their home in North Dakota to see her in prison and found her pale and weak, but generally in good spirits.
The U.S. State Department has also sought Saberi’s release, including pushing for consular contact with her and comments that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made in late March during a press conference in the Netherlands.
Saberi’s arrest was first publicized by National Public Radio in the U.S. on March 1, following a phone call they had received from her father on Feb. 10.
Her father, Reza Saberi, told Reporters Without Borders (RSF) that she stopped working formally as a journalist in 2006, and did not have access to news and information because she did not have press accreditation
“Her writings were just personal notes and comments about cultural and literary subjects with a view to writing a book about Iran,” Saberi’s father told RSF last month. He added that she had been studying Farsi and Iranian culture at a Tehran university.
According to RSF, it is a common practice for journalists and bloggers to be arbitrarily arrested and held in unknown locations in Iran. Blogger Hossein Derakhshan, for example, has been held in an unknown location since 1 November, but his arrest was confirmed by the local judicial authority on Dec. 30.
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