Peace Activist jailed in Iran back in California

Ali Shakeri, an Iranian-American peace activist who spent four months in a Tehran prison has returned home after posting bond with Iranian authorities. Shakeri was arrested in May and charged with endangering national security, along with three other Iranian-Americans. He was released in late September, at the same time that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was in New York to attend the U.N. General Assembly. Shakeri is a founding board member of the University of California, Irvine’s Center for Citizen Peacebuilding. He was detained after traveling to Iran to visit his ailing mother. Shakeri has given speeches and radio interviews advocating democracy in Iran and has written occasionally for Payam-E-Ashena, a pro-democracy Persian magazine based in Laguna Hills. His son told reporters that he was allowed to leave the country after posting a property deed for about $110,000 and may have to return to Iran to answer the charges against him, but that the family has little information about the legal process there, or even the exact charges he faces.