Roxana Saberi, a former Miss North Dakota and a top ten finalist in the Miss America pageant, turned her attention to journalism and has been a successful freelance reporter living in Iran, filing stories and pictures for the BBC, National Public Radio and other media. According to her father, she was also writing a book about Iran and had planned to return home, after living in Iran since 2003, this year.But Saberi has been arrested and is being held incommunicado by Iranian police. In a phone call from Saberi to her father on Feb. 10 (the last anyone has heard from her), she said the arrest was for buying a bottle of wine but just this morning Iranian officials finally announced there's more involved. "Foreign ministry spokesman Hassan Ghashghavi did not confirm or deny whether Roxana Saberi, 31, was being detained by the Iranian authorities, but said her activities were 'illegal'."
A few minutes after that Feb. 10th call, Saberi had phoned her parents again and asked "Please don't do anything because they'll release me in two days." She had already been detained 10 days by that point. And there's been nothing since then save this terse, unhelpful response from Iran this morning.
The Associated Press reports, "Human rights groups have repeatedly criticized Iran for arresting journalists and suppressing freedom of speech. The government has arrested several Iranian-Americans in the past few years, citing alleged attempts to overthrow its Islamic regime. The most high-profile case came in 2007, when Iran arrested four Iranian-Americans, including the academic Haleh Esfandiari. The four were imprisoned or had their passports confiscated for several months until they were released and allowed to return to the U.S."
Saberi earned a double major in French and Communication in 1997 from Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota; earned a Master's Degree in Broadcast Journalism from Northwestern University in Chicago; and in 2000, Roxana earned another Master's Degree in International Relations from Cambridge University in England.
