Italian journalist Cecilia Sala reveals horror of captivity in Iranian jail

Cecilia Sala on Sunday detailed the horror of being locked up in one of Iran’s most notorious prisons.

“I was being interrogated for 10 hours straight, hooded and with my face to the wall,” Sala said during an interview at “Che Tempo Che Fa,” a popular Italian TV program, after her release earlier this month.

“During one interrogation, I collapsed so they gave me a pill to calm me down,” she said, adding that the interrogator would use psychological techniques to “break her.”

“In some moments they try to make you relax by giving you a prize, such as a date or a cigarette, and other times they try to break you by giving you bad news,” she said.

Sala was arrested by Iranian authorities on Dec. 19 and accused of “violating the law of the Islamic Republic” while on a reporting trip in Tehran. She was then released on Jan. 8, after 21 days in detention. Her arrest came a few days after the arrest of Mohammad Abedini, an Iranian national who had been accused of supplying drone components to Iran. Abedini was arrested by Italian authorities in Milan following a request from the United States. He was then released on Jan. 12, four days after Sala.

Sala said she never thought that her release would happen so quickly.

“This has been the fastest operation to release a prisoner in Iran since the 1980s. I have been following Iran as a journalist and I knew the other cases, so I knew that 21 days was not an option,” she said.
‘Often heartbreaking’

During her time in Tehran’s Evin prison, Sala was placed in a tiny isolation cell, without a mattress to sleep on and with a bright white light always turned on. “In those conditions, it’s very hard to sleep and your body loses sense of time,” she said.

“On the first night I asked if I could have the Koran in English, because I thought it was a book that they could not deny to me,” she said. “Instead, they did, so I started spending time counting my fingers, reading the ingredients on the bread bag and repeating the multiplication tables,” she added.

“Isolation does not only mean being in a cell alone, but it also means not having any distraction,” she said. “You are always alone even when you are not alone, because even when they are interrogating you, your face is covered, you are facing the wall. The guards’ faces are also covered,” she added.

Sala said that from her cell she could occasionally hear noises from other cells of prisoners trying to harm themselves.

“There was a girl who would take run-ups, as far as she could in such a small cell, to bang her head as hard as she could against the security door,” she said. “The noises coming from the corridor were often heartbreaking, often crying, often vomiting, sometimes attempts to hurt herself.”

The journalist said she was afraid that with Donald Trump returning to power in the U.S., her case might have become more fraught.

“I knew there was a countdown to Trump’s inauguration and that scared me very much,” she said. “If Trump would have said publicly that he wanted to retaliate against some Iranians, my situation would have become very complicated.”