Torture of Italian Journalist in Iran Prison: ‘I was trapped in a game’

After Iran elected a more moderate president last year, Italian journalist Cecilia Sala thought things might be changing in the country, which she covered from afar.

For two years, Iran denied his request for a press license, but granted it to him after the election. Colleagues and friends told him that Iran’s new government appeared to be more open to foreign journalists as it sought to repair relations with Europe.

Ms Sala, 29, has not traveled to Iran since 2021, before an uprising led by women and girls demanding an end to clerical rule. So he flew to Tehran, the capital.

“I want to see with my own eyes what has changed,” he said in a recent interview in Rome.

Instead, he had direct experience of things that had not changed.

On December 19, while he was preparing an episode of the Italian podcast he hosts every day, two agents from the department came to his hotel room in Tehran. -intelligence in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. When he tried to get his phone, he said one of them threw it across the room.

They blindfolded her, Ms. Sala said, and took her to the infamous Evin prison, where most of Iran’s political prisoners are held and some are tortured.

At one point, when he asked what he was accused of, he was told that he had “committed many illegal activities in many places”.

Iran has used the detention of foreign nationals and dual nationals as a cornerstone of its foreign policy for five decades, since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. The detainees — journalists, businessmen, aid workers, diplomats, tourists — is an effective hostage used by Tehran. other countries to exchange prisoners and release frozen cash.

Mrs. Sala feared from the beginning that she was being held hostage to take her place.

He said he had read that Italy had arrested an Iranian engineer three days earlier at the request of the United States. The engineer, Mohammad Abedini Najafabadi, is wanted for his alleged role in providing drone technology to Iran that was used in an attack that killed three American soldiers in Jordan.

“I was trapped in a game bigger than myself,” he said.

Ms. Sala said she is concerned that if the United States insists on extraditing Abedini, he could spend years in prison, depending on the decision of incoming US President Donald J. Trump on his release. .

At Evin, guards gave Ms. Sala a prison uniform, she said – a gray jumpsuit, a blue shirt and pants, a blue hijab and a long veil called a chador. They took his glasses, but he was blind.

His room had two blankets and no mattress or pillow. The light was always on, he said, so he couldn’t sleep.

Several days later, when he looked closely at the yellow walls of his cell, he saw blood stains, matching marks, he said, perhaps left by a former prisoner to mark the day, and the word “freedom.” in Farsi.

He was blindfolded for hours of almost daily interrogation where he sat facing a wall, he said.

His interrogator spoke flawless English, he said, noting that he knew Italy well by asking him if he liked Roman or Neapolitan pizza.

She was sometimes allowed to speak to her parents and boyfriend in Italy, she said, and when her mother told reporters there about her daughter’s condition in prison, she told Ms. Sala, the investigator, said that because of these comments, Iran will detain her for a long time. longer.

“Their game is to give you hope, and then use your hope to break you,” Ms. Sala said.

Through the narrow opening of her bedroom door, she said she heard crying, vomiting, footsteps and what sounded like people running and banging their heads against the door.

“I thought if they didn’t take me out, I would end up like this,” Ms. Sala said. He was afraid that if they kept him long, he would say, “I will return as an animal, not a man.”

On January 8, Ms Sala flew home, and shortly afterwards Italy released Abedini. Ms. Sala was freed in part with Elon Musk’s help, two Iranian officials said. “I contributed a little bit,” Mr. Musk wrote in X.

Ms. Sala said she wanted to go back to work.

“I’m going back to being a journalist in a hurry,” he said. “Telling other people’s stories.”

His plight resonated, especially for journalists who wanted to travel to Iran.

“Of course I will not go back to Iran,” said Ms. Sala. “At least as long as the Islamic Republic exists.”

Farnaz Fassihi contributed reporting from New York.