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A UC Berkeley lecturer jailed in Iran for nearly four months was released Sunday, but will remain in Iran for the time being while the investigation against him continues, a friend said. 

Dariush Zahedi is staying with family members in Tehran after friends and family paid in $250,000 bail to secure his release. 

Zahedi is free to return to his home in Lafayette, said his friend, Rutgers Professor Hooshang Amirahmadi, who spoke to him Sunday. But the lecturer is staying because he hopes to disprove allegations that he went to Iran to foment student protests against the Islamic Republic. 

“His hope is the judiciary will see this as a misunderstanding,” Amirahmadi said, adding that he may return to the United States before the case is resolved.  

Zahedi, 37 and a naturalized U.S. citizen, was arrested at his brother’s Tehran office one day after meeting with a pro-reform group in Iran. The meeting coincided with annual student protests commemorating a July 19, 1999, demonstration that was violently suppressed by militias loyal to the ruling clerics. 

Iranian officials accused Zahedi of being a U.S. spy, but Amirahmadi said he was the victim of bad timing: Arriving in Iran during a wave of student protests and increased tensions with the United States over Iran’s budding nuclear capacity. 

“He made a mistake meeting with those people, but he could not be a spy,” Amirahmadi said. 

Zahedi was placed in solitary confinement at Evin prison north of Tehran, where Iranian-Canadian journalist Zahra Kazemi died while being held for photographing student protesters. But the Berkeley man told his friend that guards treated him “OK.” 

Amirahmadi and Zahedi are both members of the American Iranian Council, which works to improve relations between the two nations. 

Zahedi, who was to teach War and Peace in the Middle East at Berkeley this fall, is the author of The Iranian Revolution Then and Now: Indicators of Regime Instability, published in 2000. In April, he co-authored an op-ed in Newsday calling for the U.S. “[t]o engage the Islamic Republic in multilateral talks” to diffuse tensions over Iran’s potential nuclear capacity. 

Edwin Epstein, chair of UC Berkeley’s Peace and Conflict Studies program, said news of Zahedi’s release “made my day,” and he was hopeful he would be back teaching in the spring. 

The Iranian Ministry of Justice is continuing to investigate the charges against Zahedi, who could stand trial if new allegations surface. 

Amirahmadi insists that Zahedi is not at risk by remaining in Iran. “The dangerous part has passed already,” he said. “If they had a significant case against him they would not have let him out on bail. He added that remaining in Iran would facilitate convincing the judiciary that he committed no crimes.