Family says Canadian-Iranian professor detained in Iran

But over the weekend Hoodfar was arrested again and taken away.

Two day before she was supposed to depart the country in March, Iran’s revolutionary guard raided Hoodfar’s home seizing her belongings and passports.

Iranian authorities have arrested an Iranian-Canadian anthropologist on unknown charges, according to her family. We don’t know if she’s in solitary confinement.

Family members have not been allowed to see her and are highly concerned about her fragile health.

Hoodfar’s sister said on Wednesday that she is very anxious for her health, “She suffers from a rare neurological illness; she often has very bad headaches”. “She is very frail physically”, her niece said. “(Hoodfar) is not an activist and she has never been political.

“We, the Homa Hoodfar family, are very anxious about her well-being and hold Judiciary officials responsible for her health”, the family said. “So we’re very confused as to why she is in these circumstances”.

Iran has arrested a visiting Canadian-Iranian expert in gender and Islam, campaigners said on Thursday, at least the fifth detention of a dual-national reported in recent months.

“It’s unfortunate that the lack of a diplomatic relationship has caused us so much trouble and I encourage an opening of dialogue between the two countries”, she said.

The jail where the professor is being held has been nicknamed Evin University due to its high population of academics and political prisoners in custody. However, after two months and now her arrest, the family is anxious quiet diplomatic pressure is not working and made the decision to make her case public.

Her plight has harrowing echoes of the case of Zahra Kazemi, a Canadian-Iranian freelance photographer who was killed in an Iranian prison in 2003.

But a senior government official not authorized to speak on the record told The Canadian Press this week that reopening the embassy is not imminent and more work needs to be done before relations can be re-established with Iran. He was in Iran covering the 2009 election, which saw Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared the president, prompting mass protests from Iranians who viewed the election results as a fraud. Hoodfar’s lawyer and cousin have been denied a family visit, Katayoon Hoodfar said, and were told that she is banned from having any visitors.

In an interview with Pakistan’s The News on Sunday in December, she told how she was an Iranian student studying overseas during the 1979 Revolution and was shocked that “the veil” suddenly became compulsory for Muslim women in the country.

If her research made her a target it was due to a misinterpretation of her work, she said.