Parvaz, 39, a reporter for Al-Jazeera’s English language television station, detailed her imprisonments in a long interview in Qatar with Al-Jazeera, then flew home to Vancouver, British Columbia, where she declined to talk to reporters without prior permission from Al-Jazeera.
Parvaz’s interview cleared up a number of points. The Iran Times noted last week that Syria said Parvaz had been sent to Iran on May 1, but that Iranian Foreign Minister Ali-Akbar Salehi said Iran knew nothing about her whereabouts on May 2, suggesting that someone was lying. Parvaz now reports that she was sent to Tehran on May 3, so Salehi could really not have known what had happened to her.
But until the end of her two weeks in Evin, from May 3 to May 18, Iranian officials never acknowledged holding her. They admitted holding her only on May 17, two weeks after she had arrived in their hands.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehman-Parast said Parvaz had committed three “violations”—trying to enter Syria on an expired Iranian passport; planning to work as a journalist without a press permit; and carrying several passports.
The first two were violations of Syrian law, not Iranian law. The third was not a violation of any law; she carries three passports because she is a tri-national: Iranian, Canadian and American.
The next day, after she was freed, Prosecutor General Abbas Jafari-Dolatabadi said, “The investigation revealed that nothing was wrong with her passport, so the order for her release was issued.” He didn’t say why it took 15 days to determine that.
In her interview on Al-Jazeera, Parvaz said she was taken to the Damascus airport May 3 where she expected to be expelled back to Qatar, from which she had flown to Damascus. “Instead, I was dragged, kicking and screaming, onto a flight bound for Tehran.… The Syrian authorities had alleged to the Iranians that I was a spy – a charge that can carry a death penalty in Iran. Fortunately, in my case, the facts were borne out. After a couple of weeks of interrogations, the investigator in Iran charged with my case determined that I was not a spy, but a journalist.”
After 15 days in Iran, “without drama or incident, I was released and put on a dawn flight from Tehran to Doha. it was a simple matter of a judge’s approval.”
As for her treatment at Evin, she said, “Although I have written critically of some of Iran’s policies, I was treated with respect, courtesy and care throughout my detention there. My room was spotless, my interrogator flawlessly polite, and the women who looked after me at the Evin Prison Women’s Detention Center saw to it that my every need was met.”
Those needs, she said, included sleeping pills because she was having nightmares every night about the men she heard screaming under torture at the prison in Syria where she was held three days and nights.
She had entered Syria on her Iranian passport, rather than her American or Canadian passports, because Iranians do not need visas to enter Syria. But she was swiftly arrested, dragged into a car “by a handful of hair” and dumped in prison.
“I’d ended up there because a scan of my luggage had revealed that I had a satellite phone and an internet hub with me—the commercially available type, nothing special, and just the sort of thing one might need while traveling in a country with spotty communications.
“Still, if that was deemed suspicious, then my American passport, complete with its Al-Jazeera-sponsored visa, sealed the deal. The agents couldn’t seem to agree what I was, or which was worse: an American spy for Israel, or an Al-Jazeera reporter. Both were pretty much on a par.
“Blindfolded, I was led to the first of my three cells—a tiny, sparse room, roughly three paces across and five length-wise. On the floor, on a ratty brown blanket, sat a young woman whose face was puffy from crying. She said she was 25 and from Damascus and indicated that she had been there for four days. She didn’t know why she’d been picked up by the Mukhabarat, the Syrian intelligence service.
“She said she was a shop assistant in a clothes store, and the designer stilettos that sat in the corner of the cell seemed to belie any suggestion that this was a girl who had left her house in order to participate in protests. She said she’d been speaking on her phone when she was hauled into a car, blindfolded and driven away. She had no idea where she was, or how long she was to stay there. She had not been allowed to contact her family.
“Our eyes moved to the month-long calendar etched on the wall, likely the artwork of a previous dweller. With unspoken glances, we each wondered how long she would remain there.”
Parvaz described how she was taken to her first interrogation and could
hear two sets of other interrogations and beatings taking place about 10 meters away on either side.
“The beatings were savage, the words uttered by those beaten only hoarse cries – “Wallahi! Wahalli!” (“I swear to God! I swear to God!”) or simply, “La! La!” (“No! No!”),” she said.
Parvaz was taken to another cell and “I caught sight of a young man, no more than 20, chained to a radiator outside the hallway. He had a legal pad on his knees, was blindfolded, and was quivering so fiercely he could hardly hold the pen with which he was probably meant to ink some sort of confession. Meanwhile, the beatings and cries outside continued.”
Her main interrogator “focused on Al-Jazeera, putting the network on the same level as Human Rights Watch. The network had been making a ‘big problem’ for Syria with the UN Security Council, he said.”
Parvaz said most of the time she and her cellmate “spent listening to the sounds of young men being brutally interrogated – sometimes tied up in stress positions until it sounded like their bones were cracking.… One afternoon, the beating we heard was so severe that we could clearly hear the interrogator pummeling his boots and fists into his subject, almost in a trance, yelling questions or accusations rhythmically as the blows landed in what sounded like the prisoner’s midriff.”