His Excellency Ban Ki Moon
Secretary General of the United Nations
3 United Nations Plaza, NY, NY 10017
U.S.A.
Cc: Ambassador Mohammad Khazaee, Iran's Permanent Representative to the UN
Cc: President Barack Obama
Cc: President Mahmoud Ahmadinjed

Your Excellencies!

We the undersigned Iranians and concerned citizens of the world are extremely alarmed to learn that a young nuclear physicist, Dr. Shahram Amiri, a citizen of Iran, was abducted and secretly held by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the U.S. government for nearly a year.  In June 2009, Dr. Amiri, one of Iran's nuclear scientists at Tehran's Malek Ashtar University vanished into thin air three days after arriving in Saudi Arabia for the annual Muslim pilgrimage.  Following his disappearance, the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran accused the U.S. authorities and the government of Saudi Arabia, as an accomplice, of abducting Dr. Amiri and filed a formal protest against Washington with the United Nations.

Since the digression involved the CIA's direct hand in a crime against a citizen of another country, the U.S. government as usual emphatically denied any knowledge of Amiri's disappearance.  For a long period of damning months, Washington continued to deny any role in the missing scientist's whereabouts.

On March 31, 2010, all of a sudden, Washington, in the midst of building one more case against Iran's legal and lawful civilian nuclear program in order to impose another round of oppressive sanctions on Iran, shamelessly admitted that the CIA had all along been holding Amiri in captivity.  The revelation of the Iranian scientist's kidnapping and secret incarceration came on the same day that President Obama announced his plan to have sanctions against Iran in place in a matter of weeks.

To justify its act of violation of international covenants and human rights, Washington resorted to a new fabrication, claiming that Dr. Shahram Amiri, voluntarily had defected to the U.S. authorities.

If that was the case, then why the U.S. government had to lie as to the status of the scientist for more than ten months?  Secondly, if for a moment we assume the claim of the U.S. State Department to be true, then why Washington does not permit Dr. Amiri to appear in public under the supervision of the UN authorities, and explain his own fate?

By all indications, the U.S. resistance to tell the truth, its total lack of transparency, its wielding the deadly instrument of the infamous CIA, the U.S. government has abducted and held Dr. Amiri against his free will.  This is another example of the U.S. government's violation of international law while claiming to be a model and guardian of human rights and civil liberties on the international scale.  What a travesty!

Dr. Amiri is not the only Iranian scientist that has vanished abroad in the past two years.  In 2007, Ali Reza Asghari, a deputy Defense Minister of Iran, disappeared in Turkey in a similar manner and the U.S. has denied having knowledge of his whereabouts.

Once again, but this time in the 21st Century, the CIA has violated the sovereignty of Iran.  This became apparent when one of its sources brazenly bragged to the media that Dr. Amiri's abduction was an "intelligence coup."  No wonder that the government of the Islamic Republic does not trust the U.S. and its allies in the exchange of its nuclear enriched uranium.

Hereby, we the undersigned, in the strongest terms, condemn the kidnapping of Dr. Shahram Amiri.

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