TEHRAN (Reuters) - The wife of a former FBI agent who went missing in Iran nine months ago said on Saturday she had not been able to find out what had happened to her husband during a four-day visit to the Islamic state to search for him.
By Fredrik Dahl
TEHRAN (Reuters) - The wife of a former FBI agent who went missing in Iran nine months ago said on Saturday she had not been able to find out what had happened to her husband during a four-day visit to the Islamic state to search for him.
"Our trip is almost over and the miracle we were hoping for has not happened," Christine Levinson told a news conference in Tehran together with her son Daniel and her sister Suzan.
"We still don't know where Bob is and the nightmare I and my family are experiencing will continue."
!ADVERTISEMENT!Robert Levinson, who retired from the FBI a decade ago, traveled from Dubai to Iran's Gulf resort island of Kish on March 8 to investigate counterfeiting and smuggling of cigarettes for a client, likely a tobacco company, according to his family.
When he failed to call on his 59th birthday two days later his wife and seven children suspected something was wrong. They have not heard from him since.
Wearing a black headscarf in line with Iran's Islamic dress code, Christine Levinson said the family members visiting Iran had met with government officials and they also flew to Kish.
She said she had no idea what had happened to her husband and whether his disappearance was linked to his work.
"We tried to retrace his steps and met with airport officials and members of the hotel staff where Bob stayed before he disappeared," she said.
Christine Levinson said she still hoped to meet Dawud Salahuddin, himself a U.S. citizen, who she has previously said was helping investigate cigarette smuggling and who met her husband at the hotel in Kish.
She said in September Salahuddin told her he was briefly detained by Iranian security authorities who wanted to check his papers and when he returned to the hotel Levinson was gone.
Salahuddin has been charged by U.S. authorities in the 1980 killing of a former Iranian diplomat and now lives in Iran.
The family was accompanied by Swiss embassy officials as Washington and Tehran have not had diplomatic ties since shortly after Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution. Switzerland represents U.S. interests in the Middle Eastern country.
Despite the lack of progress, Levinson's wife said Iranian officials had been cooperative: "They have said they are continuing the search and they will tell me when they have finished their investigation what they have discovered."
She believed Levinson was still in Iran, but a government spokesman said the authorities did not know where he was.
"We have no information about him," Gholamhossein Elham told a news conference earlier on Saturday.
In August, the U.S. State Department said it had urged his family to think twice about visiting Iran, where four U.S. citizens have been detained this year. They were released later.
(Additional reporting by Hossein Jaseb; Editing by Matthew Jones)
