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Michael R. White, a US Navy veteran, was arrested in Iran on unspecified charges in July 2018.
The mother of a US Navy veteran sentenced to 10 years in prison by the Iranian government said Tuesday that he had lost his appeal and that she feared being forgotten by the US government.
Michael R. White was found guilty of insulting the supreme leader of Iran and publishing private information online. He was the first American to be imprisoned in Iran after the inauguration of President Donald Trump. Few other details are known about his case.
Joanne White, speaking through a spokeswoman for the family, said she was disappointed that Trump did not mention his son or daughter. other Americans detained in Iran during his address to the United Nations General Assembly.
Family spokesman, Jonathan Franks, said Joanne White had no way of communicating with her son and that she was relying on officials from the Swiss government who met him as much as possible. She wants to ask the Iranian government to let him call her. The White House did not contact her, he added.
"I think she's feeling that it's now time for her case to receive as much attention as those for whom the president managed to get people back home," Franks said.
Trump has obtained the release of a dozen Americans held hostage or unjustly imprisoned abroad since taking office.
Franks said that 46-year-old Michael White had recently undergone surgery to remove a melanoma and his mother was worried about his health, especially in the deplorable conditions in which he is being held in Iran.
The family has raised funds via a GoFundMe page to send it to the Swiss government to provide it with sufficient food, Franks said.
"We are exploring all the opportunities and continue to hope that President Trump will personally manifest his interest," said family lawyer Mark Zaid in an email to The Associated Press.
Joanne White said that her son, who lived in Imperial Beach, California, traveled to Iran to meet a woman whom she described as being his girlfriend and booked a flight back on the 27th. July in San Diego via the United Arab Emirates. She filed a missing person report with the State Department after he did not board the flight.
She said that he was following a treatment for a neck tumor and was suffering from asthma.
White worked as a cook in the US Navy and left the service about a decade ago.
It remains difficult for Americans to obtain visas in Iran, 40 years after the hostage crisis of the Islamic Revolution and the American Embassy, but Franks said that Michael White had gone there legally.
The other detainees in Iran are:
– Siamak Namazi, an American of Iranian descent, and his father, the octogenarian Baquer, former representative of UNICEF, former governor of the Iranian province of Khuzestan, rich in oil. Both are serving a 10-year spying sentence.
– The Iranian-American art dealer Karan Vafadari and his Iranian wife Afarin Neyssari.
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Xiyue Wang, a US-Chinese graduate student, was sentenced to 10 years in prison after being accused of infiltration into the country while he was conducting a doctoral research on the Qajar dynasty in Iran.
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