Missing physicist may have been jailed in Iran

Nature : A physics student at the University of Texas at Austin has been unjustly imprisoned in Iran since February, according to his colleagues. Omid Kokabee is an atomic molecular physicist who works with lasers and previously worked in nonlinear optics, but he has nothing to do with nuclear physics, write Michele Catanzaro and Eugenie Samuel Reich for Nature. He returned home to visit his parents over the winter break, and never returned. According to Kaleme , an online magazine affiliated with the Iranian political opposition leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi, Kokabee was arrested as he tried to catch his flight back to the US from Imam Khomeini International Airport and was brought to Evin prison in Tehran, where he was placed in solitary confinement and interrogated. Nature has not been able to verify these claims. Kokabee graduated in 2005 from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, worked for several companies in Iran, and in 2007 moved to the Institute of Photonic Sciences (IFCO) in Barcelona, Spain, to work as a research assistant. He moved to Austin in August 2010 for his PhD studies at the University of Texas.