February 26, 2021
A British-Iranian academic sentenced in Iran to nine years and three months for “cooperating with a hostile state” has fled across the mountains and is now safely back in Britain, he has announced to the public.
Kameel Ahmady, an anthropologist who has written about genital cutting in Iran, said February 3 he had left Iran in December by crossing its mountainous western border after being sentenced by a Tehran court that month. He was free while awaiting action on his appeal. He is now back at his home in London with his wife and four-year-old son.
Ahmady was arrested in August 2019, shortly after Gi-braltar, a British colony, had seized an Iranian ship off Gibraltar. A week later, the ship was released and an interrogator told him, “Thank you very much. We got our ship back. And I think you made a difference here. So, thank you for this. But we still really have a long way to go with you.”
“Those in Iran who have an iron fist left me no option but to pack my bag for my decisive journey,” Ahmady said in a statement on his website. He did not say whether he had received help, how he evaded controls or how he had reached Britain. He said he escaped only with his laptop and copies of some of his writings. He said the snow was 1-1/2 meters (5 feet) deep at some points as he walked across the mountains. He told The Guardian he had to try several times before he finally succeeded in getting out.
Ahmady has also faced accusations of sexual misconduct. The Iranian Sociological Association, where he had been director of a subsection, expelled him last year, citing allegations from female colleagues. In an unusual public statement, the association said it had investigated the claims and concluded there was evidence of at least some form of abuse of power.
In a written response, Ahmady denied the accusations and called them “very upsetting.”
There was concern among some that Ahmady’s escape might cause trouble for another British-Iranian held in Tehran, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who will complete her sentence in April. Iran’s Judiciary doesn’t necessarily release people when there sentences have been completed.
Ahmady said that after his 2019 arrest he had been held in solitary confinement for three months in Evin Prison and blindfolded during interrogations. Confinement was so excruciating, he said, that he yearned for interrogations, as they provided the only form of human contact he received.
“You just become mentally disabled, insensitive to your environment,” Ahmady told the British broadcaster Channel 4.
Ahmady, who is of Kurdish ethnicity, was born in northwestern Iran and received British citizenship in the 1990s. He had gone to Britain at the age of 18 for his college education.
He has published several reports and books on genital cutting and child marriage in Iran. In a report published in 2015, he wrote that genital cutting was “embedded in the social fabric of Iranian culture” in at least four provinces.
“I know for sure that my prison term is a tool for the Iranian security services and the Justice Ministry to intimidate and pressure the remaining few people who are working on social issues,” Ahmady said in the statement.
According to local reports in December, prosecutors in Tehran accused him of working in concert with the United States and others, charges he has denied.
He was tried by Judge Abol-Qasem Salavati, one of the regime’s most notorious jurists who handle political cases. Ahmady said Salavati focused on the fact that Ahmady had met with Majlis deputies seeking to raise the minimum age for marriage to stop the exploitation of young girls. Ahmadi quoted Salavati as writing in his judgment, “Generally, it can be said that increasing the age of marriage for children is one of the strategies of the enemy for weakening and ruining the family system, and that Mr. Kameel Ahmady is one of the leaders in the implementation of this strategy in Iran.”