Three dual nationals to go on trial in Iran

Tehran : Iran has charged and is to put on trial three dual nationals who also hold US, British and Canadian citizenship, Tehran's prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi announced Monday.

Dolatabadi, quoted by the judiciary's news agency mizaonline, said a Lebanese national would also go on trial.

"The accusations against Nazanin Zaghari, Homa Hoodfar and Siamak Namazi have been referred to the court," a process which leads to trial, he said of the three holding Iranian and Western nationalities.

The prosecutor did not specify the charges against the three.

Iranian-US businessman Namazi has been detained since October 2015, according to his family.

Washington has regularly called for his release as well as of his 80-year-old father who has been detained since February.

Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard has accused Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, an Iranian-British national who works for the Thomson Reuters Foundation arrested on April 3, of having taken part in the "sedition movement" of widespread protests that followed the 2009 re-election of former hardline president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Homa Hoodfar, a 65-year-old anthropologist who also holds Canadian nationality, was arrested in early June on accusations of "feminist activities" and "security offences", according to Iranian media.

State television says she was a founding member of a London-based advocacy group, Women Living Under Muslim Law (WLUML).

The Tehran prosecutor also said that Nezar Zaka, a Lebanese resident of the United States who was arrested in Tehran at the end of 2015, would face trial along with seven others accused of links to the 2009 "sedition movement".

State television has said Zaka had "close links with the US military and intelligence communities", broadcasting pictures of a man in military uniform on an American base that it said were of the Lebanese national.