Iran TV Anchor’s Children Subpoenaed to Appear before US Jury

“We still have no idea what’s going on,” Hossein Hashemi told Press TV late on Wednesday, adding that he and his siblings had been subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury.

He further said his mother was being held in a prison, apparently as a “material witness”.

“She seemed OK. She was upset about the kind of treatment that she was receiving as a person who (faces) charges would be treated. She had only eaten pretzels because her dietary restrictions limited her from the kinds of food that the prison facility would offer. She is also upset about the fact that her hijab was removed during processing and later on she was only able to cover her hair with a T-shirt apparently,” he said.

Hossein said, “I think it is important to know that she is an American citizen and she is a journalist. She is somebody who does documentaries on Black Lives Matters and is critical of a lot of the domestic policies of the United States government, the school-to-prison sort of pipeline and the white community and also the wars abroad and the regime change policies that the United States enforces all the time and puts major budgets behind”.

Marzieh Hashemi was detained in St. Louis, Missouri, where she had filmed a Black Lives Matter documentary after visiting relatives in the New Orleans area. She was then taken to Washington, according to her elder son.

The FBI recently told AP in an email that it had no comment on the arrest of the woman who was born Melanie Franklin in New Orleans and has worked for Iran’s state television network for 25 years.