EDMONTON -- Salmat Javheri still wells up with tears when she remembers the most important phone call of her life.

After days of agonizing doubt and fear last June, her 26-year-old daughter finally managed to get through from Iran to say she and her sister were safe and sound.

"All Tanyar said when she finally got through was, 'Don't worry, we're still alive,' " Javheri recalls, struggling to keep her composure. "For days before that, I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep. I just sat, watching the news."

And now Javheri can't fathom why Canadian immigration officials won't let Tanyar Pooyeh reunite with the rest of her family in Edmonton. Since September, the 26-year-old student has lived in Malaysia.

Javheri, her husband Mahmoud Pooyeh and son Kamyar watched in horror last spring as Iranian government forces brutally repressed students protesting the federal election. The military also choked off all communication with the outside world, leaving the Edmonton couple with no idea if their two adult daughters, Tanyar and Rozhyar Pooyeh, had been caught up in the turmoil.

At the time, Javheri told Sun readers about the sickening horror of watching young people beaten and gunned down.

"It wasn't safe for anybody," Javheri says. "The army was going after anyone on the street."

While the bloodshed is over, a dark cloud still hangs over the family. Immigration officials have allowed four members of the family to reunite in Canada, but have inexplicably forbidden Tanyar to come here.

"They told her not to apply again until her situation changes," Javheri says. "I don't understand. She's young, single, educated, fluent in English and knows some French. She would contribute to the economy."

Javheri has been trying to get her entire family out of Iran since 2000, after her teenage daughters were arrested for talking in public with a man who wasn't related to them.

She finally got a visa to work as a nanny in 2003.

By 2007, she was able to sponsor her husband and 13-year-old Kamyar as immigrants.

At the time, she says, she was told she could also sponsor her daughters, who were legally adults but still students. But later on, she says, officials said they were too old and would have to apply to immigrate on their own.

Rozhyar, who has her master's degree in international law, is still in Iran. But she is currently working through the Alberta Immigrant Nominee Program's family stream. She's sponsored by her parents, but they're only allowed to sponsor one person at a time.

Tanyar wanted to get her master's degree in computing science at the University of Alberta, but Javheri said immigration officials rejected her student visa application because they were "not satisfied" that she was a legitimate student.

Then, she says, they accused her daughter of trying to "sneak around the system" when she applied for a visa as a nanny, even though she had a family willing to hire her.

Heartbroken because she couldn't be with her family, but still determined to get out of Iran, Tanyar applied to get into a master's program at a university in Malaysia.

"She was approved for a student visa and accepted into the university in less than two weeks," Javheri says.

"They had no problem with accepting her. And now the money we were willing to pay the University of Alberta to educate her has been wired to Kuala Lumpur."

In a brief e-mail to the Sun, Tanyar said, "everything is quite good now."

ANDREW.HANON@SUNMEDIA.CA