A stunned former prime minister of Norway complained that he was caught up in the maw of Donald Trump's controversial executive order and detained this week by border agents at Washington's Dulles International Airport because he visited Iran in 2014. Kjell Magne Bondevik, a Lutheran minister, travels frequently for his job at the Oslo Center, which promotes peace, democracy and human rights, and he went to Washington, D.C., last week for meetings associated with the National Prayer Breakfast. The former PM and the president of the Oslo Centre, a human rights organisation, said that the officials at the airport told him that he was being questioned because of a law introduced by the Obama administration in 2011 to block the visa waiver programme where people from at least 30 countries could walk through after showing their passport. In a separate interview with US broadcaster ABC7, he said that officials at the airport told him that the questioning was not to do with the recent "Muslim ban", and was instead related to a 2015 law signed by President Barack Obama following the Paris terrorist attacks. “I was asked why I had stamps from Iran and what was the purpose of my visit to the United States,” Mr. Bondevik said in a phone interview late Friday, after returning to Oslo. Bondevik, in the interview, said he had traveled to the United States in January 2016, with the Iranian visa in his passport, without incident.
Former Norwegian Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik says he was detained at Dulles Airport earlier this week because he had visited Iran in 2014. A Lutheran minister, Mr. Bondevik was in Washington for meetings associated with the National Prayer Breakfast.