Javad Rahighi is director of the Iranian Light Source Facility. Credit: Maziar Moussavi/ ILSF

On 30 October, Javad Rahighi headed from Tehran to Rome for a four-day work trip. The nuclear physicist met with colleagues from Italy’s Elettra synchrotron and then went to Lund, Sweden, to visit the Max IV synchrotron (see Physics Today, June 2015, page 21).

But what began as a routine trip turned into a nightmare. On 3 November, when Rahighi went to board a flight home, he was detained at the Copenhagen airport and held for two days.

The detention in Copenhagen was a “horrific ordeal,” Rahighi says. The first night he was held in a cold basement room in the airport that had “no bed, no windows, no heating, no restroom. And I was without proper clothing.” He describes being taken out of the room during the night three times to identify his suitcase, provide a DNA sample by swabbing his cheek, and be photographed “wearing only my underwear.” The next day he was taken to a jail cell, which at least had a cot and a toilet. “Nobody explained the reason for my detention,” he says. His family in Iran did not know his whereabouts.

In the three-plus decades since the 64-year-old Rahighi completed his PhD in nuclear physics at Edinburgh University in Scotland, he has worked in his native Iran, first at the Esfahan Nuclear Technology Center and then at the Nuclear Research Center in Tehran. All along he has continued to work with colleagues from abroad on nuclear structure and astrophysically important nuclei.

In 2003 Rahighi joined the effort to build SESAME, a synchrotron light source for users across the Middle East and beyond. He worked mostly on committees arranging for the training of scientists, and he also served as a member of Iran’s delegation to the project, which finally opened in Allan, Jordan, in 2017 (see Physics Today online, 26 May 2017).

For the past eight years Rahighi has served as director of the Iranian Light Source Facility (ILSF), which is in the R&D stage. “Iran had no major experience in accelerators,” he says. “We had to start from scratch.” In 2011 a site for the synchrotron was selected in Qazvin, 150 kilometers west of Tehran. The final design is nearing completion. Rahighi notes that European labs have helped with the ILSF and that the ILSF team had hoped that US labs would help too, “for the sake of the promotion of science.” Those hopes were “dashed due to political differences between Iran and the US.”

Rahighi was never told why he was stopped at the airport, but in a Copenhagen court he realized that the authorities thought he was restricted by sanctions. He had been named individually in the 2010 sanctions imposed on Iran by the United Nations (see Physics Today, August 2010, page 22). The claims in the earlier sanctions document that he was involved in uranium enrichment were “totally baseless,” he says. “I am a nuclear physicist, not an engineer. I have always promoted scientific collaboration between Iran and the rest of the world.”

Colleagues inside and outside Iran stand by Rahighi. Longtime colleague Mohammad Lamehi-Rachti told Physics Today in 2010 that Rahighi “had nothing to do, either directly or indirectly, with the enrichment of uranium or the nuclear cycle.” And Joseph Niemela, a senior scientist at the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, describes Rahighi as a “highly respected scientist and friend who has worked tirelessly to establish open international collaborations under very difficult circumstances.”

The sanctions on Rahighi were lifted with the signing of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear accord in July 2015. Since then he has traveled to the US and Europe multiple times. This past fall, many sanctions were reimposed when the US pulled out of the agreement, but Rahighi was not named again. (See Physics Today, January 2019, page 22.)

Rahighi was released and flew home on 5 November. A letter to the Iranian embassy in Denmark from the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs says the incident “resulted from a regrettable misunderstanding” and that steps have been taken to avoid “similar situations in the future.”

Rahighi is still stinging from the experience. “I am a member of the world science community. My rights as a scientist and as a human being have been violated,” he says. He is seeking compensation from authorities in Denmark.