Five Americans imprisoned in Iran have been released and placed under house arrest as part of the first step of a planned prisoner exchange between Tehran and Washington, officials have said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The US-Iranian dual nationals include businessmen Siamak Namazi, 51, and Emad Shargi, 58, as well as environmentalist Morad Tahbaz, 67, who also has British nationality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They had all been jailed at the notorious Evin Prison on spying charges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The identity of the fourth US citizen allowed out of prison has not been made public, while a fifth man had already been released.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“My belief is that this is the beginning of the end of their nightmare,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told a news conference in Washington, but cautioned that it was just the first step in a process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“There’s more work to be done to actually bring them home.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It follows months of negotiations between the two countries that will include a number of Iranian prisoners being freed and the release of $6bn in Iranian government assets blocked under US sanctions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
White House National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson confirmed the five were all out of prison and under house arrest, saying they should never have been detained.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She said talks for their eventual release “remain ongoing and are delicate”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Five Americans imprisoned in Iran have been released and placed under house arrest as part of the first step of a planned prisoner exchange between Tehran and Washington, officials have said. The US-Iranian dual nationals include businessmen Siamak Namazi, 51, and Emad Shargi, 58, as well as environmentalist Morad Tahbaz, 67, who also has British […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7190,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[220],"tags":[1894,2919,1932,193,2920],"class_list":["post-7189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-americans","tag-house-arrest","tag-iran","tag-news","tag-prisoner-swap-deal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/miaminewsnetwork.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/miaminewsnetwork.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/miaminewsnetwork.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miaminewsnetwork.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miaminewsnetwork.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7189"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/miaminewsnetwork.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7189\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7191,"href":"https:\/\/miaminewsnetwork.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7189\/revisions\/7191"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miaminewsnetwork.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/miaminewsnetwork.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miaminewsnetwork.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miaminewsnetwork.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}