Iran releases physicist after five-year imprisonment

Physics graduate student Omid Kokabee has been released from Iranian custody, more than five years into a decade-long prison sentence for baseless espionage charges, his lawyer announced 29 August. The decision by Iran’s judiciary to grant “conditional release"—essentially parole—to the 34-year-old laser physicist came amid intensifying international pressure from human rights groups, scientific organizations, and social media activists. Kokabee had spent the past three months on medical furlough, recovering from surgery to remove a cancerous kidney (see Physics Today Online, 25 May 2016 ).

“It’s very good news,” says Hadi Ghaemi, a physicist and cofounder of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran. “And we don’t get good news from Iran very often.” Ghaemi’s group called for Iran to allow Kokabee to leave the country immediately so that he could resume his scientific career; Ghaemi and other sources familiar with the case say they are unsure whether the parole ruling restricts Kokabee’s travels.

Kokabee was arrested in January 2011 at Tehran’s international airport as he tried to return to school at the University of Texas at Austin after visiting his family. A court sentenced him to 10 years in prison for cooperating with hostile governments. However, documents reveal that Iran tried to coerce Kokabee into performing nuclear research for the military. The Tehran Appeals Court upheld the punishment even after the country’s Supreme Court, in theory the highest court in the land, issued in 2014 a scathing point-by-point rebuttal of all charges.

Kokabee’s health steadily deteriorated during his stay in the notorious Evin Prison in Tehran. On 20 April his right kidney was removed after doctors discovered a cancerous tumor. A month later a judge granted Kokabee the temporary medical furlough. Ghaemi and other activists hoped the furlough signaled that Iran was backing down, a means of saving face while bowing to international pressure.

Considering the multiple rejections of previous parole requests, worldwide attention to the case almost certainly played a role in Kokabee’s release. “A lot of judicial decision making in Iran is influenced by international campaigning,” Ghaemi says. His group, along with Amnesty International, the Committee of Concerned Scientists, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society (APS), and others wrote letters and drew attention to the unjust imprisonment. “No case consumed more of our time than did that of Omid Kokabee,” says Don Howard, chair of the APS Committee on International Freedom of Scientists. Ghaemi also credits Kokabee’s lawyer, Saeed Khalili, for working tirelessly for his client’s release.

“If there is a lesson to be learned,” Howard says, “it is about the importance of illuminating the darkness in which threats to human rights can thrive if the eyes of the world are not constantly attending to those threats.”