credit: National Press Photographers Association

Bits and pieces of information have been dribbling out of Iran since my Monday blog on Roxana, so I figured it was time for an update. Besides, I’ve tracked down a lot more pictures that should help bring her alive to those of you who don’t know her.

First of all, and most importantly, we now know where she is. And that’s a decidedly mixed blessing. She’s being held in Evin Prison, which is just outside of Teheran. The BBC calls it Iran’s most notorious prison and it’s probably best known to the outside world for having an entire wing devoted to political prisoners.

credit: Fariba Amini

The most chilling aspect of this news is that this is where Canadian-Iranian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi was arrested and imprisoned in June, 2003 after taking photos of families of the prison’s inmates. She died in custody a mere two weeks later, killed by a blow to the head during interrogation.Iranian authorities have acknowleged the cause of her brain hemmorhage but no one has ever been charged with her death. Some accounts claim she was also raped and tortured before she died.

credit: Agence Presse Francais

On a more encouraging note, Roxana’s father tells me he’s been told torture is not carried out at that prison. Interrogations, yes, but torture, no. Reza Saberi and his wife remain very nervous but they say they feel much better at least knowing where she is. They’re also reassured by the fact that no less a personage as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has acknowleged Roxana’s predicament and has promised to use all the diplomatic power our State Department can muster to win her release.

We also know a little more about what might have led to her arrest. Roxana hurriedly told her father in a very brief phone call on Feb 10 that she’d been detained for illegally buying alcohol. An Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman says that Roxana had been working “illegally” after her press credentials had been revoked in 2006. Her father says she stayed in Iran after she lost her credentials in order to work on a Master’s degree in Iranian Studies and International Relations and write a book about her impressions of Iran. In fact, she was just a couple months of work away from finishing the book when she was taken into custody.

Reza tells me the arrest puzzles him because his daughter’s reporting was always very balanced, never betraying any personal opinion. He also points out that she readily adopted the mandatory clothing restrictions placed on women.

credit – Saberi family credit -Behrouz Mehri/AFP/Getty

The above pictures are a great indication of how easily this beauty queen from North Dakota could blend into her surroundings. Journalism is as often as not about ego, but Roxana’s journalism was never about her. She was never the story and never wanted to be. Or maybe she just had enough of the spotlight in 1997 when she was Miss North Dakota in the Miss America pageant.

credit- Saberi family

As I mentioned in my last blog entry, those of us who knew her because of the RIAS/Berlin exchange program were more than amused that someone so serious about her work could also have been a beauty queen.

Not that she wasn’t a beauty. She was a Top Ten finalist for Miss America and won the Miss America “Scholar” Award (no surprise there.) Whenever we brought up the Miss America topic, she would smile graciously but she never seemed to want to talk much about it. I don’t know if she thought it hurt her credibility or what.

Roxana really wanted to do serious journalism. Her Dad tells me she gave up on her TV news jobs in Fargo and Houston because she felt covering fires, shootings, and traffic accidents was simply not challenging enough. She wanted to cover stories that mattered to the world. Spending the last six years in Iran put her smack dab in the middle of world events. But right now, she has become the story. And if I know Roxana, that’s the last place she wants to be.

credit: AP Photo/ The Forum, Jay Pickthorn