“I asked for the Bible. I couldn’t speak anymore”. Journalist Cecilia Sala tells the story of her 20 days of detention in Iran
Cecilia Sala, a 29-year-old Italian journalist, has returned home after being detained for 20 days in Iran’s Evin prison, where she was subjected to what experts call “white torture” – isolation and deprivation sensory.
Cecilia Sala
In her first statements after her release, the journalist described the harsh conditions in detention: she was kept in a narrow and high cell, without a bed, with a lamp always on and a small window in the ceiling that she could not even see through. The food consisted mainly of “small portions of dates”, which were given to him through a slot in the door, writes Repubblica.
“I lost all sense of time. I no longer knew when it was day and when it was night,” Sala recounted. Desperate for isolation, he asked for a Bible, not for religious reasons, but because he hoped it might be one of the few books available in English in the prison.
His only contacts with the outside world were a few strictly controlled phone calls with his family and visits from the Italian ambassador Paola Amadei, “the only face I could see in almost twenty days”.
In a dramatic call on January 1, the family noticed that her voice was changing due to fear and exhaustion.
Two days before her release, she was moved to a larger cell with an Iranian inmate who did not speak English. He got his glasses back and a book – “Kafka by the Sea” by Haruki Murakami.
The release came suddenly, on the night of Tuesday to Wednesday, when she was transferred to the Italian embassy in Tehran and then transported home. Upon arrival at Rome’s Ciampino airport, his first desire was to smoke a cigarette, before giving statements.
Although he did not report physical violence, the conditions of detention – isolation, lack of a bed, permanent light – are considered forms of psychological torture. The journalist never found out what the charges against him were.
Source: www.mediafax.ro
