“She looked terrible,” said Marcus Hellwig, a German journalist who was locked up for nearly five months in the same prison. After six years on death row, she looked washed out and sick. There was “no comparison to the beautiful woman she once was.” Hellwig told The Times of London in an interview.
Hellwig, 46, began speaking publicly last week for the first time since he and Jens Koch, a photographer who also worked for the German newspaper Bild am Sonntag, were released from the Tapirs prison a year ago. They had been arrested four months earlier in October 2010 while interviewing Ashtiani’s son at her lawyer’s office.
Hellwig said he repeatedly refused requests to appear at a news conference with Ashtiani, who had previously “confessed” to complicity in her husband’s murder during appearances on state television that her supporters insist were coerced.
However, he was blindfolded one day and taken out of the prison. When the blindfold came off, he was in a room with intelligence agents and a state television journalist. Without warning, the door opened and Ashtiani was brought in.
Hellwig said she complained in a low, soft voice about his interference in her case. “It was immediately clear to me that she had been forced to do this,” he said. “After five horrible minutes, we were separated again.”
Hellwig said he had still not fully recovered from his ordeal, which ended last February when he and Koch flew home with German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle.
The Iranians the journalists met were less fortunate. Ashtiani’s son, Sajad Ghaderzadeh, and her lawyer, Javid Houtan Kian, were arrested alongside them. Ghaderzadeh, 24, was freed after a few months, having participated in one of his mother’s televised “confessions.” He has no longer pushed the campaign he started to save her.
The lawyer, Kian, is being held incommunicado in jail and has been abused, the Times said. Kian’s own lawyer, Naghi Mahmudi, was forced to flee to Turkey and where he said Kian “would never be able to return to normal life because he’s suffered so much physical and mental torture.”
Hellwig said that after his arrest he was held in solitary confinement in a tiny, windowless cell with the light never turned off. He was beaten, made to stand for hours without moving, and interrogated almost non-stop for 10 “brutal” days and nights
Bild am Sonntag said he had electric shocks administered through his lips. “There was a time when I was up against my mental limits,” he said.
He was repeatedly accused of being a spy or a terrorist and was taken to a torture chamber so he could see what happened to other prisoners. “I thought I was going to die there. I thought that was the end,” he said.
The treatment as described appeared far worse than anything administered to the American hikers during their years in Evin prison. That begged such questions as to whether Tabriz jailers are harsher than the staff at Evin in Tehran, or whether American prisoners are exempt from the harshest treatments for fear that might spark a militarily response.
Only after German diplomats intervened did Hellwig’s treatment improve. He said he was put in a larger cell with other inmates, but from the moment he woke each morning he could hear other prisoners being tortured. “Right above our cell there was obviously a torture chamber. The screams were horrible,” he said.
Ashtiani, 44, was first jailed in 2006 after receiving 99 lashes for having had an “illicit relationship.” In July 2010, the regime suspended her stoning after an international outcry, but she still faces the possibility of execution. Many, however, suspect the regime will not risk a further international outcry and will just leave her to rot in the Tabriz prison.