Global General

Abductee or defector, nuke scientist back in Iran

(Agencies)
Updated: 2010-07-16 14:48
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Amiri's precontrol of armed agents of US intelligence services," Amiri told reporters.

Previously he claimed the CIA "pressured me to help with their propaganda against Iran," he said, including offering him up to $10 million to talk to US media and claim to have documents on a laptop against Iran. He said he refused to take the money.

"I am a simple researcher who was working in the university," he said. "I'm not involved in any confidential jobs. I had no classified information."

Amiri refused to say how, if under guard, he could have escaped US agents to release videos in which he alleges that he had been snatched by American and Saudi kidnap teams while onr citizens." He was referring both to the imprisoned hikers and to Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent who disappeared in Iran in 2007. US officials have repeatedly pressed Iran for movement in both cases.

Iran's deputy foreign minister, Hassan Qashqavi, said there would be "no link" between Amiri's return and the case of the three Americans, whose families say they were hiking in northern Iraq and that if they crossed the border, they did so inadvertently.

Amiri was generally a footnote in the international showdown over Iran's nuclear ambitions until last month. Iranian state TV aired a video he purportedly made from an Internet cafe in Tucson, Arizona, to claim he was taken captive by US and Saudi "terror and kidnap teams."

The video was shortly followed by another, professionally produced clip in which he said he was happily studying for a doctorate in the United States. In a third, shaky piece of video, Amiri claimed to have escaped from US agents in Virginia and insisted the second video was "a complete lie."

US officials never acknowledged he was on American soil until Tuesday, hours after he turned up at the Iranian interests section at the Pakistani Embassy in Washington asking to be sent home. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Amiri had been in the United States "of his own free will and he is free to go."

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