(U-WIRE) BERKELEY, Calif. — A University of California at Berkeley political science lecturer is being held in solitary confinement in Iran on charges of espionage, an Iranian newspaper reported Wednesday.

Lecturer Dariush Zahedi was scheduled to teach "War and Peace in the Middle East" this fall but never showed up for class after a trip to his native country, Iran, this summer.

Rumors about Zahedi's disappearance circulated for a few weeks among his UC Berkeley colleagues and students. His class was canceled, and concerned students and colleagues tried to contact him.

"The relevant authorities in the university are very attentive to this issue, and they will do what they can," said David Collier, chair of the political science department.

Ali Ezzatyar, a close friend and a reader for Zahedi's classes last year, was supposed to meet up with him in mid-July. They e-mailed regularly so he was puzzled when Zahedi stopped responding around July 11.

Ezzatyar found out later in the summer from Zahedi's brother that the Iranian government arrested him sometime after July 9, the day of a large annual protest marking a deadly police crackdown on a 1999 student uprising in Tehran.

Ezzatyar said it was very unlikely Zahedi had participated in the protest because he knew it could jeopardize his safety.

Zahedi has been able to contact his family a few times since he was imprisoned, and as of a month and a half ago was in good health, Ezzatyar said.

Some students speculated that Zahedi may have been arrested for something he said that the Shiite-dominated Iranian government decided was blasphemous.

"The government hard-liners seem to pick on people periodically, and this seems random. Thousands of people go in and leave Iran every day with no problems," said Jaleh Pirnazar, a lecturer in Near Eastern studies and Persian.

Zahedi had travelled between the United States and Iran since he started teaching courses at UC Berkeley in spring of 2002, but had never been arrested.

Many of his students said Zahedi was well-liked and very popular.

"He's as nonpolitical as a political scientist can be," Ezzatyar said. "Pro-shah and pro-Islamic students all came to his classes."

Zahedi taught "Modernization of Iran, Turkey and Afghanistan" and the "Iranian Revolution, and its Impact on the Middle East" in the political science department.

He is the West Coast director of the American Iranian Council, a nonprofit organization that works to improve relations between the United States and Iran. He also wrote "The Iranian Revolution Then and Now: Indicators of Regime Instability," which examined the roots of the Iranian Revolution.

The Iranian government has a history of detaining Iranians who speak out against it. It jailed 2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi for three weeks in 2000. Ebadi, then a lawyer, had written critically about the government's activities at Tehran University in 1999.

Earlier this year, the Iranian government held two Iranian reformists who published a poll revealing that three-fourths of Iranians wanted their country to resume relations with the United States. The two countries have not held diplomatic relations since a band of Iranian students took over the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979, holding dozens of U.S. citizens hostage.

— Regina Chen