Iran officially confirmed on Sunday that it is holding an Iranian-American peace activist, the fourth dual citizen the country has detained in recent months. Mohammad Ali Hosseini, the spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry, confirmed at his weekly news briefing that Iranian-American Ali Shakeri had been detained. On Friday, the semi-official ISNA news agency had first reported that Shakeri of Lake Forest, California, was being held and investigated by the security department of the Tehran prosecutor’s office. At the briefing, Hosseini also reiterated that Iran has no information about a former FBI agent, Robert Levinson, who the United States says has been missing since March after traveling to an Iranian resort island on private business. “In a meeting with the Swiss ambassador, we reminded them that we have not found any information about him (Levinson),” Hosseini said when asked about the former FBI agent. The Swiss Embassy handles US interests in Iran because the United States and Iran do not have formal diplomatic ties. At his briefing, Hosseini also accused the US of using scientific and research cooperation as a guise to work against Iran. Many academics have criticised Iran for arresting scholars. The US State Department has said Shakeri, a founding board member of the University of California, Irvine, Centre for Citizen Peacebuilding was supposed to have left Iran for Europe on May 13 but never arrived.
