On Thursday in Rome, Italy’s international ministry summoned the Iranian ambassador, demanding the rapid launch of Italian reporter Cecilia Sala from Iran’s infamous Evin jail.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
OK, let’s head abroad now. Italy’s Overseas Ministry summoned Iran’s ambassador at present to demand the rapid launch of an Italian reporter from an Iranian jail. Cecilia Sala was working in Iran below a journalist visa. She was seized on December 19. That was three days after Italian police arrested an Iranian man wished by U.S. authorities. From Rome, Megan Williams studies.
MEGAN WILLIAMS, BYLINE: Well-liked Italian podcaster and freelance reporter Cecilia Sala’s final report from Iran on December 16…
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CECILIA SALA: (Talking Italian).
WILLIAMS: …Talking right into a smartphone digital camera about adjustments within the nation…
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SALA: (Talking Italian).
WILLIAMS: …How 1000’s of girls within the Islamic Republic now now not concern going out in public with no veil…
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SALA: (Talking Italian).
WILLIAMS: …And the way Israel’s chief, Benjamin Netanyahu, continues to make threats after Israeli airstrikes in October. Three days later, the 29-year-old was arrested as she was heading again right here to Italy for the vacations. She’s since been in solitary confinement inside Iran’s infamously harsh Evin Jail, in a frigid cell with neon lights on 24/7, her eyeglasses taken away.
JASON REZAIAN: My first thought was, this is one other one.
WILLIAMS: That is Jason Rezaian. Ten years in the past, he was the bureau chief for The Washington Submit in Tehran and was held in the identical jail for a 12 months and a half.
REZAIAN: Properly, she’s in all probability being subjected to very harsh interrogations based mostly on nothing.
WILLIAMS: Rezaian says reporting from Iran is dangerous, however Sala’s arrest is unlikely associated to her journalism. As an alternative, it is doubtless a reprisal. Her detention got here three days after Italy arrested Iranian Mohammad Abedini in Milan. Abedini was wished on a U.S. warrant for allegedly supplying drone components prosecutors say have been utilized in an assault that killed three U.S. troopers in Jordan initially of final 12 months. The Iranian embassy in Rome linked Sala’s arrest to that of Abedini for the primary time on Thursday and, to date, has solely charged her for breaching Islamic regulation.
REZAIAN: The truth that she hasn’t been accused of something particular but is simply a sign of the Iranian facet slow-playing its hand.
ROBERTO MENOTTI: Sala was very unlucky to be within the unsuitable place on the unsuitable time.
WILLIAMS: Roberto Menotti is deputy editor-in-chief of the suppose tank journal Aspenia and knowledgeable on Iran relations with Europe and the U.S. Whereas he calls it a silver lining – the truth that Iran did not lay a particular cost towards Sala – most others arrested like her are accused of spying. He says…
MENOTTI: They’re in all probability keen to barter on particular points, however they don’t seem to be concerned about reactivating a basic dialogue with Europe, with Italy, with the U.S. And that makes them very harmful. They do not have a lot to lose.
WILLIAMS: The American request for extradition from Italy of Iranian Abedini makes her case dicier, he says.
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ANTONIO TAJANI: (Talking Italian).
WILLIAMS: Within the meantime, Italy’s international minister, Antonio Tajani, says Italy is working to unravel what he calls a particularly intricate drawback. Rezaian says Sala and all foreigners arrested by Iran on what Western international locations name spurious costs deserve their authorities’s full resolve in securing their launch.
REZAIAN: It is a phenomenon {that a} rising variety of authoritarian states are utilizing – a device – a international coverage device.
WILLIAMS: He says the U.S. and allies can solely put an finish to those sorts of imprisonments with a unified technique, not case-by-case offers.
For NPR Information, I am Megan Williams in Rome.
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