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

After Iran elected a more moderate president last year, Cecilia Sala, an Italian journalist, thought something might have changed in the country she covered from afar.

For two years, Iran had rejected his request for a journalist visa, but it granted him one after the elections. His colleagues and friends told him that Iran’s new government seemed more open to foreign journalists as it sought to repair relations with Europe.

Ms Sala, 29, had not visited Iran since 2021, before an uprising led by women and girls demanded an end to clerical rule. So she took a plane to Tehran, the capital.

“I wanted to see with my own eyes what had changed,” she said recently in an interview in Rome.

Instead, she was able to see for herself what hadn’t changed.

On December 19, while she was preparing an episode of an Italian podcast that she hosts daily, two intelligence agents from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps visited her hotel room in Tehran. When she tried to grab her phone, she said, one of them threw it across the room.

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