Iranian scientist claims swap deal

TEHRAN: An Iranian scientist, who returned home last week saying he had been held by US agents for more than a year, has said that he was pressed to agree to be exchanged in a “spy” swap for three US hikers in custody in Tehran.

In an interview aired by state television on Saturday, Shahram Amiri claimed that US agents had acknowledged that the three Americans, detained on the Iran-Iraq border in July last year, were indeed “spies”.

Washington has repeatedly called on Tehran to release Shane Bauer, 27, Sarah Shourd, 31, and Josh Fattal, 27, insisting that they were holidaymakers who had innocently strayed across an unmarked border.

Iranian officials have raised the possibility of trying the trio for espionage, but no official charges have been announced.

Amiri returned to Tehran on Thursday just over a year after he mysteriously disappeared from Medina while on a pilgrimage.

He had resurfaced last week at the Iranian interests section in the Pakistani embassy in Washington maintaining that he had been kidnapped by US agents.

Amiri said in the interview that the “spy swap” offer emerged after US agents holding him discovered he had been in touch with Iranian agents while in the US.

“They [US agents] wanted me to say that ‘I was an Iranian intelligence agent infiltrating the CIA’,” Amiri said.

“If I said this, they said I could be part of a spy exchange programme.”

In previous interviews Amiri has said he was kidnapped at gunpoint by two Persian speaking agents of the CIA in Medina.

US officials have repeatedly denied that Amiri was abducted, insisting he was in the US of his own free will while acknowledging that Washington “had been in contact with him” during his stay.

In his latest interview, Amiri said the US agents had “reached wrong conclusions” about his research work which was in the area of health physics in Tehran’s Malek Ashtar University of Technology.

“They kept asking irrelevant questions and wanted to link Iran’s peaceful nuclear work to that of weaponisation,” Amiri said.

He said after his “negative” answers, the US agents put him through a lie detector test.

“In the end they realised that it was worthless intelligence-wise and that their scheme to abduct me had been defeated.”

He said that he was shown documents “explaining the process of making nuclear weapons which they wanted me to say I had brought to America.”

Amiri said the US agents were angry when they discovered Iranian agents had contacted him by “methods and codes” which helped him recognise that they were from Iranian intelligence.

“These are issues which I can’t talk about as they could hurt national interests,” he said without elaborating on how Iranian agents contacted him inside the US.

Amiri said that he was “handed over” to the Iranian interests section in Washington by US agents.

“They reached a conclusion that they wanted to close the case and wanted to send me back to Iran,” he said.

Amiri also rejected reports in the US media that he had been paid five million dollars to defect.

Foreign ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast meanwhile denied a New York Times report that Amiri had operated as a CIA agent inside Iran for several years.

“We perceive that all this propoganda was directed... at not allowing the Iran nuclear issue to take its normal course,” Mehmanparast told the ILNA news agency.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 19^th, 2010.