U.S. student held in Iran set free in prisoner exchange
WASHINGTON — Iran on Saturday freed a U.S. graduate student who had been imprisoned in Tehran for more than three years on suspicion of being a spy in an exchange of prisoners at a moment of high tensions with Washington.
Xiyue Wang was flown in a Swiss government airplane from Tehran to Zurich, where he was met by Brian Hook, the State Department’s special representative for Iran, according to two senior U.S. officials.
Wang, 38, was a fourth-year Princeton University graduate student conducting research in Iran when he was arrested there in August 2016.
Wang was charged with espionage and sentenced to 10 years in prison. U.S. officials deny that Wang, who had been locked in
Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison, was a spy.
In exchange for Wang’s release, the U.S. freed Masoud Soleimani, an Iranian scientist who was arrested at a Chicago airport last year and was convicted on charges of violating U.S. trade sanctions against Iran.
The senior U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the delicate nature of the exchange, said they saw no indication that it portended a larger dialogue with Iran.
Trump administration officials believe that Iran may have released Wang in order to soften its image and deflect attention from a recent brutal crackdown on mass domestic protests. U.S. officials believe that the unrest has left hundreds dead.
Wang, who has a wife and a young son, was a student of late-19th- and early-20th-century Eurasian history, according to a
Princeton website. Backed by university funding, he went to Iran in 2016 to study Farsi and conduct archival research for his doctoral dissertation.
Iran’s government charged that Wang had been “sent” to the country by Princeton and that he had ties to U.S. intelligence agencies.
In September 2018, a U.N. human rights panel found that Iran had “no legal basis” for Wang’s “arbitrary” imprisonment and said he should be released immediately.
Soleimani, a prominent stem cell researcher who had been treating stroke patients at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, was charged with violating U.S. trade sanctions by seeking to transfer growth hormones to Iran without a license.
He is not related to Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s senior military commander.
Masoud Soleimani’s lawyers argued that the sanctions law at issue was ambiguous and that he had been swept up in rising tensions between the U.S. and Iran under President Donald Trump.