Death of Iran general spurs anxiety over fate of U.S. hostages
WASHINGTON — The killing of a top Iranian general has ratcheted up the anxiety of families of Americans held in Iran, one month after the release of a New Jersey student had given them hope.
The Trump administration has made a priority of bringing home hostages held abroad, but the prospect of a forthcoming resolution for the handful of captives in Iran seems to have dimmed with the two nations edging dangerously close to conflict and warning of retaliatory strikes and continued agitation.
“He wasn’t safe before now, but now he’s really not safe,” said Joanne White, whose son, Navy veteran Michael White of Imperial Beach, San Diego County, has been imprisoned since July 2018 while visiting a girlfriend in Iran. “I don’t know if anyone is going to retaliate.”
The tensions are the worst in 40 years and are in contrast to the diplomatic breakthrough that resulted in December’s release of Princeton University graduate student Xiyue Wang in exchange for the U.S. freeing a detained Iranian scientist. Crushing U.S. sanctions on Iran remain in place, but the release suggested Tehran could be open to using additional American captives as bargaining chips for future negotiations.
Weeks earlier, Iran had acknowledged in a filing to the United Nations that it had a “missing person” file on former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who vanished in the country in 2007. One of his daughters, Sarah Levinson Moriarty, told reporters last month that she considered the notice from Iran a significant development and an acknowledgment that the country had her father and knew where he was.
Even so, there were already concerns about how recent protests in Iran tied to spiking gas prices were going to affect the fate of Western prisoners.
The new tensions have caused even...