Mr. Ahmady said he was locked up in solitary confinement in the Evin prison, north of Tehran, for three months after his arrest in 2019 and was blindfolded during repeated interrogations. He says the incarceration was so disturbing that he longed for interrogations as it was the only form of human contact he received.
“You just become mentally handicapped, insensitive to your surroundings,” Ahmady told British broadcaster Channel 4.
Mr. Ahmady, who hails from Kurdish ethnicity, was born in northwestern Iran and received British citizenship in the 1990s. He has published several reports and books on genitals and child marriages in Iran. In a report published in 2015, he writes that genitals in at least four provinces are ’embedded in the social structure of Iranian culture’.
“I know for a fact that my imprisonment is a tool for the Iranian security services and the Ministry of Justice to intimidate and put pressure on the remaining few people working on social issues,” Ahmady said in a statement on Wednesday. website has been published. .
According to local reports in December, prosecutors in Tehran accused him of working in collaboration with the United States and others, which he denied.
More than half a dozen foreigners and dual citizens are being held in Iranian prisons, including Ms. Zaghari-Ratcliffe; Fariba Adelkhah, a French-Iranian academic; Siamak Namazi, a businessman, and his father, Baquer Namazi, a former UNICEF official, both Iranian-Americans; Ahmad Reza Jalali, a Swedish-Iranian doctor and researcher; Nahid Taghavi, a German-Iranian architect; and Morad Tahbaz, an Iranian-American environmentalist.
Kylie Moore-Gilbert, a British-Australian scholar detained in 2018 on charges of spying for Israel, was released in December in a prisoner exchange with three Iranian men.
Farnaz Fassihi reported.