Aras Amiri Released on Bail

Aras Amiri, a cultural activist and student at Kingston University in the UK, was released after weeks of detention in Iran upon paying a bail of 500 million tomans. The news of Ms. Amiri's release was announced on Tuesday, May 21, by Mohsen Omrani, her cousin, on his Twitter account. The news of Aras Amiri's arrest was initially shared by her cousin on Twitter as well. Mr. Omrani, who resides in the United States, reported on Radio Farda on April 1 that she had traveled to Amol to visit her grandmother and was arrested in Tehran on the day she intended to return to the UK. According to Mr. Omrani, Ms. Amiri was in a car with several friends in Tehran on the evening of March 14, 2018, when a vehicle of security agents stopped them and arrested her. In his recent tweet, Mohsen Omrani stated that his relatives were able to obtain Ms. Amiri's bail release order after 'two months' of effort. Reports indicate that Aras Amiri has been living in London for the past ten years and is a master's student in art philosophy. Ms. Amiri is not the first Iranian residing abroad or a dual national to be arrested following a trip to Iran. In recent years, several Iranians living abroad have been detained and imprisoned upon returning to Iran. In one of the latest cases, Abbas Adalat, an Iranian-British citizen and a professor of mathematics and computer science at Imperial College London, was arrested at the home of a relative in Tehran around early April while attending a workshop.