Dorothy Parvaz, 39, was on an assignment from Al-Jazeera television.
Parvaz was born in Iran and lived here with her grandmother there through the revolution, then joined her parents in the United Arab Emirates. When she was 13, the family moved to the Iranian community in North Vancouver, British Colombia.
She speaks Farsi, Arabic and English.
After getting an undergraduate degree from the University of British Columbia, she studied journalism at the University of Arizona and worked as a reporter at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer for almost a decade.
She holds Iranian, Canadian and American citizenship.
She joined Al-Jazeera last year and was recently in Japan covering the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami. Last week, she was sent to Syria.
Because Americans and Canadians need visas to enter Syria while Iranians do not, she was traveling on her Iranian passport.
The US embassy told her family it had checked the hotel where she had a reservation and she never checked in there last Thursday. That suggested she was arrested at the airport on arrival.
Al-Jazeera has been very loudly demanding that the Syrian government say what it knows about Parvaz. Syria has said nothing.
Her father, Fereydun, know as Fred, is a physics and computer science instructor at Langara College and Capilano University in British Columbia. He said he has made repeated calls to the Syrian government and has been told nothing about his daughter.
He told The Vancouver Sun, “When you get into this profession, you’re not always sent to a royal wedding, you know. She’s just doing her job.”
Syria has not been authorizing journalists to enter the country to cover the disorders. Syrian police at the airport may have discovered who she was and arrested her. It is isn’t known if al-Jazeera told her to declare her employment or hide it on entering Syria.