October 04-2013
Omid Kokabee, a University of Texas at Austin graduate student who has been imprisoned in Iran more than two years, has received a human rights award from the American Physical Society (APS) for refusing to collaborate on Iran’s nuclear program.
APS is the largest organization of physicists in the United Sttes.
In May, an Iranian court sentenced him to 10 years in prison for “communicating with a hostile government” and receiving “illegaal earnings,” apparently the student loans he received while in Texas.
Kokabee, who is an Iranian citizen, was arrested in January 2011 when he traveled to Iran to visit family over his winter break. While waiting for his return flight, he was pulled aside by security forces at Imam Khomeini Airport.
On May 15, he was tried with 14 other prisoners. The presiding judge, Abol-Ghasem Salavati, handles many political cases.
Human rights groups say Kokabee was sentenced to 10 years in prison without ever speaking to a lawyer, having a chance to defend himself in court or having any evidence presented against him.
Kokabee says he may have been targeted by the government because he refused to work on the country’s nuclear program. Iran has been pursuing a kind of uranium enrichment called SILEX that uses carbon dioxide lasers, the same kind of lasers that Kokabee was using in his graduate studies.
In a letter he wrote from prison, Kokabee said he had been approached multiple times since 2005 by agents from the Iranian government asking him to join the country’s nuclear program. He said that even during his incarceration he was told that if he agreed to help enrich uranium, all of the charges against him would be dropped. Kokabee refused to collaborate, and remains in prison.
“Is it a sin that I don’t want, under any circumstances, to get involved in security and military activities?” Kokabee wrote in his open letter from jail.
He was awarded APS’s Andrei Sakharov Prize for ”his courage in refusing to use his physics knowledge to work on projects that he deemed harmful to humanity, in the face of extreme physical and psychological pressure.”