Academic flees Iran for UK while awaiting court appearance

Mr Ahmady decided to try to flee while on bail and appealing against the sentence.
Family handout

A British-Iranian anthropologist sentenced to nine years in a Tehran prison managed to flee the country while on bail and is now living in the UK.

Kameel Ahmady was convicted two months ago after being accused of “working for a hostile government, a charge he denies.

He decided to flee, escaping over the country’s mountainous border, evading the country’s Revolutionary Guards.

Speaking to Channel 4 News, he told of how he managed to leave the country while awaiting a court appearance.

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was seized with her baby daughter Gabriella

He also described the harrowing conditions he experienced while in solitary confinement at the jail, which holds the country’s so-called political prisoners including Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and British-Australian academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert.

Mr Ahmady, who undertook the first study of female genital mutilation in Iran, said he was held for 100 days in solitary confinement in Evin prison, to the north of Tehran.

“You are blindfolded at all times, even in the first or second week of your interrogation, and then finally they will ease it down a little bit.

“You are basically pushed into a room and then you hear the guards are closing or locking the door, and then someone will tell you behind the door that you can lift your blindfold.

“So, when you lift it up, I saw a small room – it was almost like a grave – and you can’t walk on it, you can’t do anything apart from either sitting down or standing up or lying down," he told the broadcaster.

Speaking about what pushed him to explain his escape, he said: “With a simple calculation I just realised my son would be near to 15 years old. Where was I in these 10 years? In Evin. He would have just been a boy coming to see me for half an hour every two weeks, over the phone, no emotional connection whatsoever.

“Taking all this into account, I come to this decision that I would really need to go, even though it would be very dangerous for me to act on it, and if I fail it would be even worse. But then I made a decision and I escaped.”

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