After Iran elected a more moderate president last year, Italian journalist Cecilia Sala wondered if something might have changed in the country she was covering from afar.
Iran had denied her application for a journalist visa for two years, but granted it after the election. Colleagues and friends told her that Iran’s new government seemed more open to foreign reporters as it sought to mend relations with Europe.
Sarah, 29, had not traveled to Iran since 2021, before an uprising led by women and girls calling for an end to clerical rule. There she boarded a plane to the capital, Tehran.
“I wanted to see with my own eyes what had changed,” she said in a recent interview in Rome.
Instead, she experienced firsthand what hasn’t changed.
On December 19, as she was preparing an episode of the Italian podcast she hosts daily, two members of the intelligence wing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps came to her hotel room in Tehran. When she tried to grab her phone, one of them threw it across the room, she said.
According to Sarah, they blindfolded her and took her to the notorious Evin prison. Most of Iran’s political prisoners are held there, and some are tortured.
At one point, he asked what he was being accused of and was told he had committed “many illegal acts in many places,” he said.
For nearly 50 years, since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Iran has made the detention of foreign nationals and dual nationals a cornerstone of its foreign policy. The detainees, including journalists, businessmen, aid workers, diplomats and tourists, are effectively hostages used by the Iranian government. Other countries exchange prisoners and release frozen funds.
From the beginning, Sarah feared she had been taken hostage for an exchange.
She said she had read that Italy had arrested an Iranian engineer three days ago at the request of the United States. The engineer, Mohammad Abedini Najafabadi, was wanted on suspicion of providing Iran with the drone technology used in the attack that killed three American soldiers in Jordan.
“I was trapped in a game much bigger than myself,” she said.
Sarah fears that if the U.S. insists on extraditing Abedini, she will remain in prison for years, with her release dependent on the decision of incoming U.S. President Donald J. Trump. He said he is doing so.
At Evin Prison, guards reportedly gave Sarah a prison uniform. A gray jersey, blue shirt and pants, a blue hijab, and a long covering called a chador. They confiscated her glasses, without which she is almost blind.
Her cell had two blankets and no mattress or pillow. She said the lights were always on and she couldn’t sleep.
A few days later, as he carefully examined the pale yellow walls of his cell, he noticed bloodstains, parallel marks, and the word “freedom” in Farsi, presumably dated by a previous inmate. .
She was blindfolded and sat facing a wall during hours of interrogation, which took place almost daily.
She said the interrogators spoke perfect English and demonstrated their knowledge of Italy by asking her whether she preferred Roman or Neapolitan pizza dough.
She said she was occasionally allowed to speak to her parents and boyfriend in Italy, and when her mother told reporters there about her daughter’s prison conditions, investigators told her that she had been sent to Iran because of her comments. told her that she would be detained, she said. For a longer time.
“Their game is to give you hope and then use that hope to crush you,” Sarah said.
She said she could hear crying, vomiting, footsteps and banging through the narrow gap in the cell door, as if someone was running and banging their head against the door.
“I thought if they didn’t take me out, I would end up the same way,” Sarah said. She worried that if they kept her for too long, she would become an animal instead of a human.
On January 8, Sara was on a flight home, and soon after, Italy released Abedini. Two Iranian officials said Sara was released with help from Elon Musk. “I played a small role,” Musk later wrote of X.
Sarah said she was eager to get back to work.
“I’m in a hurry to get back to journalism,” she said. “To tell someone’s story.”
Her ordeal resonated widely, particularly among journalists who wanted to travel to Iran.
“Of course I won’t go back to Iran,” Sara said. “At least as long as the Islamic Republic exists.”
Farnaz Fassihi contributed reporting from New York.
