After Iran elected a extra reasonable president final 12 months, Cecilia Sala, an Italian journalist, thought one thing could have modified within the nation, which she had been protecting from afar.
For 2 years, Iran had rejected her software for a journalist visa, nevertheless it granted her one after the election. Colleagues and associates instructed her Iran’s new authorities appeared extra open to international reporters because it sought to restore relations with Europe.
Ms. Sala, 29, had not traveled to Iran since 2021, earlier than an uprising led by girls and ladies demanded an finish to clerical rule. So she took a aircraft to Tehran, the capital.
“I needed to see with my eyes what had modified,” she stated in an interview not too long ago in Rome.
As a substitute, she acquired firsthand expertise of what had not modified.
On Dec. 19, as she was getting ready an episode of an Italian podcast that she hosts day-after-day, two brokers from the intelligence wing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps got here to her lodge room in Tehran. When she tried to seize her telephone, she stated, one in every of them threw it to the opposite aspect of the room.
They blindfolded her, Ms. Sala stated, and took her to the infamous Evin jail, the place most of Iran’s political prisoners are held and a few are tortured.
At one level, when she requested what she was accused of, she was instructed, she stated, that she had dedicated “many unlawful actions in lots of locations.”
Iran has used the detention of foreign and dual citizens as a cornerstone of its international coverage for almost 5 a long time, because the Islamic Revolution in 1979. The detainees — journalists, businesspeople, assist staff, diplomats, vacationers — are successfully hostages whom Tehran leverages with different nations to swap prisoners and free frozen funds.
Ms. Sala feared from the beginning that she had been taken hostage for a swap.
She stated she had learn that Italy had arrested an Iranian engineer three days earlier on the request of the US. The engineer, Mohammad Abedini Najafabadi, was needed for his alleged function in offering drone expertise for Iran that was utilized in an assault that killed three American troopers in Jordan.
“I used to be trapped in a sport a lot larger than I used to be,” she stated.
Ms. Sala stated she anxious that if the US insisted on extraditing Mr. Abedini, she may linger in jail for years, her launch contingent on the choice of the incoming American president, Donald J. Trump.
At Evin, the guards gave Ms. Sala a jail uniform, she stated — a grey tracksuit, a blue shirt and pants, a blue hijab and a protracted protecting generally known as a chador. They seized her glasses, with out which she is all however blind.
Her cell had two blankets and no mattress or pillow. The sunshine was continuously on, she stated, and she or he couldn’t sleep.
Solely after a number of days, when she carefully inspected her cell’s gentle yellow partitions inch by inch, did she discover a blood stain, parallel marks, she stated, maybe left by a earlier inmate marking the times, and the phrase “freedom” in Farsi.
She was blindfolded throughout hours of almost each day interrogations during which she sat going through a wall, she stated.
Her interrogator spoke flawless English, she stated, and signaled that he knew Italy properly by asking whether or not she most well-liked Roman or Neapolitan pizza crust.
She was permitted to talk at occasions together with her dad and mom and boyfriend again in Italy, she stated, and when her mom instructed reporters there about her daughter’s circumstances in jail, the interrogator instructed Ms. Sala that due to these remarks, Iran would detain her for for much longer.
“Their sport is to offer you hope, after which use your hope to interrupt you,” Ms. Sala stated.
Via a slim opening in her cell door, she stated she heard sounds of crying, vomiting, footsteps and banging that sounded as if somebody was operating and hitting his or her head in opposition to the door.
“I believed in the event that they don’t take me out, I’m going to additionally find yourself like this,” Ms. Sala stated. She feared that in the event that they stored her for lengthy, she stated, “I’d come again an animal, not an individual.”
On Jan. 8, Ms. Sala was on a aircraft residence, and shortly after, Italy freed Mr. Abedini. Ms. Sala was released partly with the help of Elon Musk, two Iranian officers stated. “I performed a small function,” Mr. Musk later wrote on X.
Ms. Sala stated she was desperate to return to her work.
“I’m in a rush to return to being a journalist,” she stated. “To inform another person’s story.”
Her ordeal has reverberated extensively, notably for journalists desirous to journey to Iran.
“Clearly, I’m not going again to Iran,” Ms. Sala stated. “At the least so long as there’s the Islamic Republic.”
Farnaz Fassihi contributed reporting from New York.
