A senior U.S. congressman on Tuesday accused the Iranian government of spitting in America's face by holding U.S. citizens while negotiating an end to sanctions in return for curbing its nuclear program.
At a House of Representatives committee hearing, relatives of three detained Americans, Saeed Abedini, Amir Hekmati and Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, said they should not be forgotten in the effort to seal a nuclear deal with Iran by a June 30 deadline.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a resolution calling on Iran to immediately release the three and to provide information about Robert Levinson, an American missing in Iran since 2007.
Committee Chairman Ed Royce, a Republican, said the detentions showed Iran's "contempt" for the United States.
"If top Iranian officials cannot be counted on to assist these wrongfully jailed Americans, can they be counted on to honor the commitments they make at the negotiating table?" he asked.
Eliot Engel, the senior committee Democrat, said that while the cases should not be tied in with the nuclear talks, it would be "ludicrous and outrageous" to have a deal with Iran that did not include freeing the Americans.
"I feel so angry that at a time when we are sitting with Iran ... to discuss a new arrangement between our two countries ... they continue to poke us in the eye and continue to spit in our face," Engel said.
This was especially so given what he called the ongoing "show trial" on espionage charges the Washington Post's Jason Rezaian, he said.
Sarah Hekmati, whose brother Amir, a former U.S. Marine, was arrested in August 2011 while visiting his grandmother in Tehran, said her father was suffering from terminal brain cancer and had several strokes in the last year.
"Our father holds on hoping to hold Amir in his arms again, but fearful that he will not," she said.
Amir Hekmati was convicted of spying for the Central Intelligence Agency, a charge relatives and Washington deny.
Current and former U.S. officials have acknowledged that Levinson was a source for the CIA when he disappeared in 2007 from Kish Island, an Iranian resort in the Gulf.
Abedini, an Iranian-American Christian pastor, was sentenced to eight years in prison in 2013 on charges of undermining Iran's national security by setting up home-based Christian churches in Iran.
