February 15, 2019
It turns out the American man arrested in Iran while visiting his Iranian “girlfriend” in Mashhad actually has a wife in California.
Michael White left his home in Imperial Beach, California, unexpectedly in the middle of the night last July, something his wife said he had done every July for six years, and flew to Iran.
The wife, Guadalupe White, told KGTV, the ABC outlet in San Diego, that Michael bought a shredder and destroyed documents before his departure. When she asked him about it, she says he told her to mind her own business.
Guadalupe said she took care of Michael during six months of chemotherapy before he left. She said her husband spent a lot of time on the computer and ordered new credit cards.
She also told the station he had a curious list of goals. “He said, ‘My goals are paying my bills and saving money. I want to go and marry my Iranian girlfriend and leave.’ He wanted to live there [in Iran] and never come back to the US,” said Guadalupe.
She says she found a letter from Michael to another man asking for $30,000 for a dowry, and she said he suddenly had $60,000 in the bank.
After a missing persons report was filed last year, Imperial Beach Police searched the home and his computer. “It looked like they found something on the computer because they said, ‘Oh my God!’ then downloaded a lot of stuff,” she said.
Imperial Beach is just south of San Diego and almost on the border with Mexico.
In December, a news outlet alerted Guadalupe that her husband was in prison in Mashhad. “My heart dropped because I’m glad to know where he is, but I’m also in limbo because I don’t know if he’s dead or what.”
She doesn’t know why Iranian police arrested Michael. Even though she says he’s cheated on her for six years, she still worries about him. “I don’t want to think of someone hurting him because I still love him,” she told the station through tears.
In Iran, Mashhad Prosecutor Gholam-Ali Sadeqi told the Mehr news agency White was arrested on a “private complaint.” He provided no information on what the complaint asserted, but said his office was also investigating “security crimes” involving the American. Again, he didn’t explain what the security issues were. White served about a dozen years in the US Navy.
Mousa Barzin, IranWire’s legal expert, wrote that Iran’s Islamic Penal Code allows security forces to arrest and jail a person based on a private complaint if the individual is accused of murder, causing injury, insult (especially sexual insults), and other offenses. “Mr. White was definitely not arrested because of a security threat because he had a ‘private’ complainant,” Barzin said. “If someone causes a security threat, then the charge is not private and the prosecutor is the complainant on behalf of the public.”
According to recent amendments to Iran’s criminal procedures, individuals can be detained only when they have been accused of committing serious crimes — such as murder and threatening people with a weapon — or if the accused person tries to flee the country after facing charges. Earlier reports said White was arrested at the Mashhad airport as he was trying to leave Iran with his girlfriend, who has not been named.
“It is important to note that Iranian laws caution against detention and the authorities must have solid evidence that someone has committed a crime in order to detain that person,” said Barzin. “But in the absence of real information about the circumstances of White’s arrest, it is very difficult to judge whether his arrest was in accordance with Iranian laws or not.”
