Iran will on Wednesday broadcast apparent confessions by two US-Iranian academics detained since May on charges of harming national security in cases that have raised tensions with Washington.
The programme, entitled “In The Name of Democracy”, will air the statements by Haleh Esfandiari and Kian Tajbakhsh, along with Iranian-Canadian Ramin Jahanbegloo, an intellectual arrested on similar charges and released in 2006.
A trailer broadcast on Monday by state television showed snippets of both Esfandiari, dressed in a black Islamic veil and coat, and Tajbakhsh, making statements to camera in separate interviews.
They appeared well and were sitting in armchairs in a well-furnished room.
The television did not broadcast complete sentences from the interviews that are due to be broadcast at 9:45 pm (1815 GMT) on Wednesday and on Thursday, making it difficult to draw firm conclusions from their statements.
Esfandiari is heard saying “they were agents for the Velvet revolution (in the former Soviet republic of) Georgia,” without giving further details.
“To divide the people from the government,” Tajbakhsh is then heard saying, before an excerpt is spliced where Esfandiari adds: “In the name of empowering women and in the name of democracy.”
Esfandiari, 67, heads the Middle East programme at the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars. She was arrested after returning to Iran late last year to visit her ailing 93-year-old mother.
Tajbakhsh is an urban planning expert had ties with the Open Society Institute of US billionaire George Soros, accused by Iran of seeking a “Velvet Revolution” similar to the toppling of communism in Eastern Europe.
Two other US-Iranians face similar charges but were not referred to in the trailer.
California-based businessman Ali Shakeri has also been detained. Parnaz Azima, a journalist for Radio Free Europe’s Persian arm, is technically at liberty but has had her passport confiscated and cannot leave the country.
The announcement, which came only in the form of a trailer on state television’s rolling news channel, contained no other details over the content of their statements.
In a reference to accusations that the pair are linked to the alleged US efforts for a peaceful overthrow of the Islamic authorities in Iran, the trailer also showed footage of the popular uprisings that unseated governments in Georgia and Ukraine.
