Dec 10, 2007 1:30 pm US/Eastern
Wife Of Missing Man Gets Help From Florida Senator
FT. LAUDERDALE (CBS4) ―
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59-year old Robert Levinson, a former FBI Agent who lives in Coral Springs, went missing while on a business trip to Iran.
bbc.co.uk
A South Florida man has been missing in Iran for nine months. On Monday, his family sat down with one of Florida's senators hoping for some help.
A week before traveling to Iran to try to find her husband or find out what's happened to him, Christine Levinson, is trying to stay positive, and hanging on to the last words he said to her.
"The last words were: I love you," Christine told CBS4's Ileana Varela. "And that makes it even more difficult, because I'm waiting to hear those words again."
Robert Levinson, a retired FBI agent, and father of 7 from Coral Springs went missing on the Iranian resort island of Kish, back in March, while working as a private investigator for cigarette companies. He was looking into the problem of cigarette smuggling.
Levinson usually called home twice a day and text-messaged his wife and the kids often from his cell phone on business trips.
When he did not call the next day, Christine Levinson called his cell phone and left a message on his voice mail, and then tried to reach him at his Dubai hotel room.
By the following day, she was worried. Levinson was scheduled to be in London but had not checked into his hotel. His business associates had not heard from him. It was his 59th birthday and he hadn't even called home.
The details of Levinson's trip to Kish remain murky. Levinson found out that her husband apparently met with Dawud Salahuddin, an American fugitive living in Iran who is wanted for the assassination of a former Iranian diplomat in Maryland in 1980.
Salahuddin has said that he was suddenly taken into custody by Iranian police while the two men were in a hotel lobby. Salahuddin said he was questioned about his documents. When he was released hours later, he returned to the hotel and discovered Levinson was gone.
Mrs. Levinson who has not been able to get any information from Iranian authorities, now has the support of Florida Senator, Bill Nelson, a member of the powerful foreign relations and intelligence committees, who has written a letter to Iran's supreme leader asking him to guarantee Mrs. Levinson's safety and help her find answers to her husband's disappearance.
"The power of Iran is the supreme leader,
Khamenei, he is the one that calls the shots," explained Nelson. "He is the one that if you want
Ahmadinejad, the president to change his tune all he has to do is snap his fingers. So he is the one that obviously has the authority to open up the vowels of the Iranian government to produce the information from Mrs. Levinson about her husband."
Mrs. Levinson, her oldest son, and a friend plan to go to Iran on December 17th. They plan to return on December 23rd and only hope that Robert Levinson is with them.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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