US authorities arrested Mojtaba Atarodi, 54, a professor at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, when he stepped off a plane in Los Angeles December 7.
Atarodi attended a bond hearing January 26 and has been released on a $460,000 bond. After a 10-minute hearing, the judge decided to place Atarodi under house arrest in his brother’s home. He will be under electronic monitoring. The proceedings were closed except to attorneys and Atarodi’s family, but reports suggested Atarodi was released partly for health concerns.
Atarodi has suffered two heart attacks and a stroke, and has undergone two major cardiac operations in the past 14 months.
No US official has agreed to comment on the case, and the case files have been sealed by the court, suggesting there may be more to the matter than a simple charge of smuggling hi-tech materials.
But others complained that the political friction between the United States and Iran have long created problems for innocent scientists.
Dr. Fredun Hojabri, a former vice chancellor of Sharif University now living in the United States, cited an incident in 2006 when more than 50 researchers, executives and engineers, trying to attend a disaster management forum organized by the university’s alumni chapter in California, were turned back by US immigration officials on their arrival because their visas had been revoked.
A spokesman from Sharif University said the arrest of Atarodi was “anti-science.”
The spokesman said, “The fact of the matter is that [Atarodi] was just a professor, and he was trying to buy some equipment for his lab, and the equipment was very, very simple, ridiculously simple stuff that anybody can buy.”
It is not a violation of the law to buy such goods. It is a violation of US export laws to send almost anything to Iran without an export license. The fact that Atarodi was arrested on his arrival in California suggests that he had been involved in sending US goods to Iran either on previous visits or through orders submitted from abroad. US law enforcement routinely charges people with violations when they file documentation hiding the destination of the goods and thus showing they know the shipment is illegal.
Atarodi’s lawyer, Matthew David Kohn, said his client had come to the United States to seek treatment from his brother’s cardiologist, but that US officials had treated him well in custody and had been accommodating of his health concerns.
Although US officials in the past have arrested many individuals—both Iranian and non-Iranian—for trying to smuggle goods to Iran, the arrest of an Iranian scientist visiting the US is a new wrinkle.
Atarodi is the author and co-author of dozens of scientific papers about microchips.
Iran and the United States do not have formal diplomatic ties, but the Iranian interests section at the Pakistani embassy – which acts as the de facto diplomatic representative of the Islamic Republic in the US – said it was aware of the case.