A doctoral student at the University of Texas will go to trial in his native Iran Tuesday for espionage charges.
Omid Kokabee, 29, visited Iran during winter break last year; upon arrival, he was arrested and has been detained since early February in Evin Prison. At Texas, Kokabee was a student in optics, and studying the interaction of lasers with plasmas.
A number of American and European optics groups have signed open letters to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei:
In its letter to Khamenei, APS suggested that the Iranian authorities had acted on a misunderstanding of Kokabee’s expertise. “Mr. Kokabee has no training in nuclear physics, is not politically active, and is not associated with any political movement in Iran,” the letter read. “Rather his primary concerns were his science studies in the field of optics. This area of physics has essentially no overlap with nuclear technology.”
Kokabee is believed to have been accused of leaking and/or selling Iran’s scientific information, and working with the CIA.
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