The ordeal of an Italian journalist in an Iranian prison: “Eru trapped in a game”

After Iran elected a more moderate president last year, Cecilia Sala, Italian journalistHe thought that something might have changed in the country, which had been covered from afar.

For two years, Iran had rejected his request for a journalist visa, but granted it after the election. Colleagues and friends told him the new Iranian government appeared more open to foreign journalists as it sought to mend relations with Europe.

Ms. Sala, 29, had not traveled to Iran since 2021, before a rebellion led by women and girls demanded an end to clerical rule. Then he took a plane to Tehran, the capital.

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

Instead, he had direct experience of what had not changed.

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

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

At one point, when she asked what he was accused of, he told her, he said, that he had done “many illegal actions in many places.”

Iran used detention of foreign and dual nationals as a cornerstone of its foreign policy for almost five decades, since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. The detainees – journalists, businessmen, assistants, diplomats, tourists – are effectively hostages that Tehran uses with other countries to exchange prisoners and free frozen funds.

Ms. Sala feared from the beginning that she was being held hostage for an exchange.

She said she had read that Italy had arrested an Iranian engineer three days earlier at the request of the United States. the engineer, Mohammad Abedini Najafabadi, was wanted for his role in procuring drone technology for Iran that was used in an attack that killed three American soldiers in Jordan.

“I was caught up in a much bigger game than I was,” he said.

Ms. Sala said she worried that if the United States pressed for Mr. Abedini’s extradition, he could remain in prison for years, his release contingent on the decision of the incoming US president, Donald J. Trump.

At Evin, guards gave Ms. Sala a prison uniform, she said — a gray tracksuit, a blue shirt and pants, a blue hijab and a long covering called a chador. They took his glasses, without which he is almost blind.

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

She was blindfolded during the nearly daily interrogation hours in which she sat facing a wall, she said.

Her interrogator spoke impeccable English, she said, and signaled that he knows Italy well by asking if she prefers Roman or Neapolitan pizza crust.

She was allowed to speak occasionally with her parents and boyfriend in Italy, he said, and when her mother told reporters there about her daughter’s conditions in prison, the interrogator told the Mrs. Sala that, because of these remarks, Iran would have detained her for much longer.

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

Through a narrow opening in her cell door, she said she heard sounds of crying, vomiting, footsteps and banging that sounded as if someone was running and banging her head against the door.

“I think if they don’t take me out, I’m going to end up like this too,” Ms. Sala said. She fears that if they keep her for too long, she said, “I’m going to turn into an animal, not a person.”

On January 8, Ms. Sala was on a plane home, and soon after, Italy released Mr. Abedini. Ms Sala was released partly with the assistance of Elon Musk, two Iranian officials said. “I played a small role,” Mr. Musk later wrote about X.

Ms Sala said she was looking forward to getting back to work.

“I’m in a race to get back to being a reporter,” she said. “To tell someone else’s story.”

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

“Obviously, I’m not going back to Iran,” Ms. Sala said. “At least as long as there is an Islamic Republic.”