Navy veteran Michael White, who has been held hostage on criminal charges in Iran since 2018, was released from prison into Swiss custody on medical furlough amid Iran’s deadly coronavirus outbreak.
“Michael White, who has been wrongfully detained by the Iranian regime since 2018 and is serving a 13-year sentence, was released today on a medical furlough. His release on humanitarian grounds was conditioned upon him staying in Iran,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced on Thursday. “Michael is now in the custody of the Swiss embassy and will undergo medical testing and evaluation. The United States will continue to work for Michael’s full release as well as the release of all wrongfully detained Americans in Iran.”
White’s release came the day after the U.S. imposed new sanctions on Iranian nuclear scientists.
The State Department thanked the Swiss government for its “continued and constructive role as our protecting power in Iran” and called for Iran to “immediately release on humanitarian grounds” other U.S. hostages, including Morad Tahbaz, Baquer Namazi, and Siamak Namazi. The State Department repeated its request that the Iranian regime “honor the commitment it made to work with the United States for the return” of former FBI agent Robert Levinson, the longest-held U.S. hostage in the world.
Although the details remain hazy, White was in Iran in July 2018 visiting a woman who his mother described as his girlfriend. White had traveled to the country previously, but this time, he was arrested and sentenced to over a decade in prison for alleging insulting Iran’s leaders and posting a private picture on the internet.
White’s mother, Joanne, set up a GoFundMe for his legal defense last year.
White’s legal team, led by Mark Zaid, who represented the whistleblower in the Ukraine impeachment saga, told the Washington Examiner that “on day 606 held hostage by the Islamic Republic of Iran, Joanne received word that Michael has been furloughed from prison and is safely in the custody of the Swiss Embassy.”
“We are grateful that the Iranian government took this interim humanitarian step. We continue to urge them to release Michael unconditionally so that he can return to the United States to receive the advanced medical care he needs,” Zaid said. “Joanne is very grateful to the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs and to the Swiss government for facilitating this furlough.”
The coronavirus outbreak has hit Iran particularly hard, with 18,407 confirmed cases and 1,284 deaths as of late Thursday morning, according to the Johns Hopkins University tracker. Many experts and U.S. officials speculate the numbers are significantly higher. In the U.S., there have been 9,415 confirmed cases and 150 deaths.
The coronavirus sickened a number of Iran’s top leaders as the nation sought to downplay and cover up the extent of the outbreak. More recently, Tehran has adopted a more serious tone over the objections of some clerics. State-run media warned Tuesday that “there will be 4 million cases, and 3.5 million people will die” if the worst-case scenario comes to pass.
Pompeo has repeatedly called upon Iran to “immediately release on humanitarian grounds all wrongfully detained Americans being held in Iran” and warned that the U.S. “will hold the Iranian regime directly responsible for any American deaths.” The secretary of state called the reports of COVID-19 spreading to Iranian prisons “deeply troubling” and said that “their detention amid increasingly deteriorating conditions defies basic human decency.”
The State Department recently released its annual human rights report, which pointed out “significant human rights abuses” by Iran’s “authoritarian theocratic republic.”
Earlier this month, the commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, Maj. Gen. Hossein Salami, claimed that the coronavirus “may be the product of America’s biological invasion,” according to the Iranian Students’ News Agency and Iranian International. Last week, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei suggested the coronavirus was a “biological attack.”
