( AFP ) - Iran has freed a US-Iranian businessman and peace activist detained since May on suspicion of harming national security, a judicial source told AFP on Tuesday.
"Ali Shakeri was released on a one-billion-rial bail (107,000 dollars) yesterday," the source said, adding that "he has to make a written request to the judge if he wants to leave the country."
The California-based activist was arrested in May along with US-Iranian academics Haleh Esfandiari and Kian Tajbakhsh, who faced similar accusations and were released on bail after spending more than 100 days in prison.
The release came as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad started his third visit to the United States where he was to address the UN General Assembly amid controversy over his stance on Israel and Tehran's nuclear programme.
Shakeri, a board member of the Centre for Citizen Peacebuilding at the University of California, Irvine, was arrested in May during a private visit to Iran to visit his ill mother, his family said.
Iran had implicated the two academics Esfandiari and Tajbakhsh in an alleged American drive to overthrow the Islamic regime, but little was made public about Shakeri, who was also kept in Tehran's Evin prison.
The arrests increased tension between Tehran and Washington at a time of growing concern about the Iranian nuclear programme, which the United States claims is aimed at making an atomic weapon.
Esfandiari left Iran and returned to her job at the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington following her release on bail of three billion rials (320,000 dollars).
Officials said Tajbakhsh, who was released last week after posting a one-billion-rial bail, must make a written request in order to leave Iran.
The urban planner worked for the Open Society Institute of US billionaire George Soros, which is accused by the Islamic republic of seeking to foment a velvet revolution in Iran.
A fourth US-Iranian, journalist Parnaz Azima who works for the Persian arm of Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, was allowed to leave the country last week after being held for more than eight months.
Azima was not jailed but her passport was confiscated and she was accused of working for a "counter-revolutionary radio" station.
In a letter to UN chief Ban Ki-moon on Monday, leading Iranian dissident journalist Akbar Ganji urged the world to condemn what he said were human rights violations in Iran.
On Monday Ahmadinejad appeared at Columbia University in New York where he was questioned and criticised over the country's treatment of academics, homosexuals and dissidents.