[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iD4SzcAeExg&hl=en_US&fs=1&]
Shahram Amiri, an Iranian physicist who has been missing since June of last year, has uploaded two separate videos online sharing completely contradictory accounts of his situation. Which video is real? Or are both just a fraud?
In his first video, Amiri says he is residing in Tuscon, Arizona after having been abducted from Medina “in a joint operation by terror and kidnap teams from the US intelligence service CIA and Saudi Arabia’s Istikhbarat.” He says that he was abducted for information about Iran’s nuclear program. Toward the end of the video, he says that if this is the last video that his family sees…for them to have patience. He looks quite disheveled in the grainy video, though there seems to be no hard evidence to indicate either that the video is real or fake.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tMY-oraOfA&hl=en_US&fs=1&]
In the second video, he is well dressed and has asked for everyone “to stop presenting a distorted image of me.” He starts off by saying that he is thankful for having the opportunity to talk and that he is living freely in the United States. He refers to himself as a simple medical physicist, and that he misses his wife and family.
Recently, US officials acknowledged that Amiri had defected and had been resettled in the United States after extensive debriefing, in which he reportedly shared valuable information to American intelligence agencies.
A U.S. official familiar with the case scoffed at the notion that he had been kidnapped, noting that if Amiri were imprisoned, it would not be possible for him to make videos for Iranian television.
Both videos raise lots more questions than answers. For now, it seems like the case of Shahram Amiri will remain an unsolved mystery.
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