Iason Athanasiadis, an extraordinary young freelance writer, radio producer and photographer, was detained by Iranian authorities on June 19 while trying to board a plane to leave the country. Iason had been covering the contested elections there. Homelands Productions joins many other media organizations in calling for his release. We know Iason as an intelligent, fair-minded, compassionate reporter with deep knowledge of the Middle East and Central Asia. A 2008 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, Iason was raised in Greece and educated in England and Iran. He holds a degree in Arabic and Modern Middle Eastern Studies at Oxford and a masters degree in Persian and Contemporary Iranian Studies from the Tehran School of International Relations. You can read and see some of Iason’s work at http://www.iason.ws.
P.S. You can read an op-ed about Iason and his detention by Homelands Productions co-founder Sandy Tolan on Salon.com.