The Italian journalist Cecilia Sala, detained in Iran since December 19, has been released and will return to Rome this Wednesday. It was announced in an official note by the presidency of the Council of Ministers of Italy. “The plane that was taking journalist Cecilia Sala home took off from Tehran a few minutes ago,” the note reads.
“Thanks to intense work through diplomatic and intelligence channels, our compatriot has been released by the Iranian authorities and is returning to Italy. The Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, expresses her gratitude to all those who have collaborated to make Cecilia’s return possible, allowing her to reunite with her family and colleagues,” the text continues with the official announcement by the Government.
The journalist, 29 years old, who works for the newspaper Il Foglio and the podcast platform Chora Media, was arrested when she was about to leave Tehran to return to Italy after more than a week of work for which she had been granted a regular journalistic visa issued by the Iranian embassy in Italy.
Since his arrest and transfer to Evin prison, a symbol of repression in Iran, Sala had received only one visit, that of the Italian ambassador in Tehran, and he was in an isolation cell with the light always on, without even not even a mattress and with only two blankets, one to put on the floor and another to protect herself from the cold.
It was not the first time that Sala visited the country. The reporter — who has been covering international news for years, from the return of the Taliban to Kabul in 2021 to the Russian invasion of Ukraine — had decided to return now to do some reports on how the scenario in Iran was changing after the fall of the regime. Bashar al Assad in Syria. Shortly after the news of his arrest was made public on December 27, suspicions began to circulate, picked up by the Italian press, of the link between his arrest and the case of a citizen with dual Iranian and Swiss nationality, Mohammad. Abedini Najafabad, detained at Milan’s Malpensa airport on December 16.
Abedini, who is an engineer, had an arrest warrant from the US, which requests his extradition and accuses him of having delivered, in violation of sanctions, US technology for the manufacture of drones to the Revolutionary Guard, which Washington considers a terrorist organization. . Drones like the ones that killed three US soldiers in Jordan last January. Abedini rejects all the accusations and in recent days the Iranian Government had denied that Sala’s arrest was a response to the engineer’s arrest.
“These two issues have nothing to do with each other. “The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance issued a clear statement on the reasons for the arrest of the Italian journalist and announced that she was arrested for violating the laws of Iran,” Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Ismail Baghaei said last Monday in his briefing. weekly press release, according to the IRNA agency.
The release of Sala would have been one of the topics that Meloni discussed at the dinner he had with the president-elect of the United States Donald Trump on January 4. A five-hour lightning visit in which the Prime Minister of Italy was received at the Mar-a-Lago residence, in Florida.
#Iran #releases #Cecilia #Sala #Italian #journalist #detained #December #Evin #prison
