MEMO concerned as reports writer detained in Iran

The British Foreign Office has said it is “urgently seeking information from the Iranian authorities” as reports emerged that MEMO writer Mahan Abedin, an Iranian-British dual national, has been arrested while on a trip to the Islamic Republic.

Abedin, who has written for MEMO on a freelance basis for a year, travelled to visit family in Iran late in February informing MEMO that he would return within three weeks.

Having not heard from him for some time, MEMO reached out to Abedin via email but had no response.

However, on Monday we received a reply which said: “Thank you for your email. I am still in Iran. I was hit by a family tragedy and hence my silence for several weeks. But I am back in action now and ready to file again.”

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It is not possible for MEMO to verify who wrote the email and we have had no response to our subsequent communication.

Iran Wire said it had received word of the arrest of Abedin in the past week, quoting an unidentified source in the capital Tehran.

The Guardian newspaper reported Abedin’s publisher, Michael Dwyer from Hurst Publishers, said they were worried that he might have run into trouble during a recent visit to Tehran.

“While we heard from Mahan by email on Monday, we have no way of verifying that his messages are genuine, and his long radio silence till then had puzzled us, given the recent arrest of other British citizens of Iranian descent,” he said.

Last Wednesday, the New York-based Centre for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) said the Iranian Revolutionary Guards had detained Abbas Edalat, a British-Iranian national who is a professor of computer science at Imperial College in London, in mid-April.

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