TEHRAN – Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said late on Monday that the detention and imprisonment of Press TV news presenter Marzieh Hashemi shows the U.S. is still violating “the civil rights of black men and women”.

“The US govt needs to explain how Marzieh Hashemi—a journalist and grandmother—is such a flight risk that she must be incarcerated until she finishes her testimony to a grand jury,” Zarif said in a message posted on his Twitter account.

Pointing to the murder of American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, he added, “50 years after MLK assassination, US still violates the civil rights of black men and women”.

SP/PA