Italy’s international ministry summoned the Iranian ambassador on Wednesday and urged the rapid launch of an Italian journalist held in solitary confinement in Tehran.
Cecilia Sala, a 29-year-old freelance journalist for Il Foglio newspaper and a podcaster, reportedly spoke of the cruel situations of her detainment within the infamous Evin jail, together with having to sleep on the ground of her cell and not using a mattress.
Sala, who was in Iran on a journalistic visa, was arrested on 19 December on fees of breaching Islamic regulation.
The international ministry stated that throughout the assembly with Mohammad-Reza Sabouri, Iran’s ambassador in Rome, it reiterated its requests for Sala to obtain “dignified detention situations that respect human rights” and for a assure that full consular help is permitted, together with permitting Italy’s ambassador in Iran to go to her and “present her with the varieties of consolation which have to this point been denied”.
Throughout a cellphone name to her dad and mom on Wednesday, Sala stated she solely had two blankets, one to sleep on and one to fend off the biting chilly, in keeping with experiences within the Italian press. She stated meals was being given to her by way of a crack within the door, that her studying glasses had been confiscated and {that a} neon gentle was on in her cell all day and evening.
On Sunday in an interview with La Repubblica, a US state division spokesperson stated Sala’s detention was allegedly a reprisal for the arrest of Mohammad Abedini Najafabadi, a Swiss-Iranian businessman and alleged arms trafficker with ties to the Iranian regime, on a US warrant at Milan’s Malpensa airport on 16 December. “Sadly, the Iranian regime continues to unjustly detain residents of many different international locations, usually utilizing them as political leverage,’’ the spokesperson stated.
Italy’s international minister, Antonio Tajani, stated the federal government was “working with nice discretion to resolve this extraordinarily intricate downside”.
Sala has almost half one million followers on Instagram and is a daily visitor on Italian talkshows. She has lined amongst different subjects the autumn of Kabul and the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the disaster in Venezuela, the battle in Ukraine and the battle between Israel and Hamas.
Evin jail is understood for the detainment of opponents of the Iranian regime, journalists and international residents. Among the many prisoners is Narges Mohammadi, the Iranian 2023 Nobel peace prize laureate, who stated in an interview revealed on Thursday that she would publish her autobiography and was engaged on a ebook on girls held like her on political fees.
Mohammadi spoke to the French journal Elle in Farsi by textual content and voice message throughout a three-week provisional launch from the jail on medical grounds after present process bone surgical procedure.
“I’ve completed my autobiography and I plan to publish it. I’m writing one other ebook on assaults and sexual harassment in opposition to girls detained in Iran. I hope it’s going to seem quickly,” she stated.
Mohammadi, 52, has been jailed repeatedly over the previous 25 years, most not too long ago since November 2021 on convictions regarding her advocacy in opposition to the obligatory carrying of the hijab for girls and capital punishment in Iran.
She stated the imprisonment had left a bodily toll. “My physique is weakened, it’s true, after three years of intermittent detention … and repeated refusals of care which have severely examined me, however my thoughts is of metal,” Mohammadi stated.
She stated there have been 70 prisoners within the girls’s ward at Evin “from all walks of life, of all ages and of all political persuasions”, together with journalists, writers, girls’s rights activists and folks persecuted for his or her faith.
One of the generally used “devices of torture” was isolation, stated Mohammadi, who shares a cell with 13 different prisoners.
“It’s a place the place political prisoners die,” she stated of Evin. “I’ve personally documented circumstances of torture and critical sexual violence in opposition to my fellow prisoners.”
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