A Navy veteran detained in Iran for nearly two years has been released and started making his way home, with the first leg on a Swiss government aircraft.
US President Donald Trump said Thursday that Michael White had now left Iranian airspace and should be home with his family very soon.
Trump said in a tweet that White was on a Swiss plane.
The US special envoy for Iran, Brian Hook, flew to Zurich with a doctor to meet White and will accompany him to the United States aboard an American plane, the officials said.
White’s release was part of an agreement involving an Iranian-American doctor prosecuted by the Justice Department, and followed months of quiet negotiations over prisoners.
“I am blessed to announce that the nightmare is over, and my son is safely in American custody and on his way home,” White’s mother, Joanne White, said in a statement. She thanked the State Department and Bill Richardson, a former US ambassador to the United Nations and onetime New Mexico governor, for raising her son’s case with the Iranians.
Richardson, who met with Iran's foreign minister and ambassador to the UN about the case, said in a statement that the “release should have and could have been done earlier, but I am glad and relieved that Mike is on his way home to get treated." White had been diagnosed with coronavirus, but has been recovering.
White, of Imperial Beach, California, was detained by Iranian authorities in July 2018 while visiting a woman he had met online and fallen in love with. He was convicted of insulting Iran’s supreme leader and posting private information online, and was sentenced to a decade in prison.
“Simply put, the ‘charges' against Michael were pretexts for a state-sponsored kidnap-for-ransom scheme,” family spokesman Jon Franks said in a statement Thursday.
“The tragedy of this case is Michael's only only crime was falling in love with Iran and its people for whom he cares deeply.”
In March, White was released from prison on a medical furlough as Iran struggled to cope with the coronavirus outbreak. White was turned over to the Swiss Embassy in Tehran, which represents US interests in Iran. He was among tens of thousands of prisoners granted medical furloughs by Iran, which was one of the first countries to be hit hard by the pandemic.
