“I’m out of my mind with worry,” Antonella Mega, wife of Hamid Ghassemi-Shall, told The Toronto Star. Her husband has been convicted of espionage by the Islamic Republic.
Last week, Mega found out that the Iranian Judiciary’s amnesty commission would not commute her husband’s sentence. Her own repeated appeals to Ottawa for help have also yielded no results.
Last Friday, Canadian Consular Affairs Minister Diane Ablonczy spoke with Mega by phone for nearly an hour, assuring her that Ottawa was using “every tool” at its disposal to help Ghassemi-Shall. But Mega said that more than a year after the death sentence, “the situation is only growing worse for Hamid, and now time is running out.”
Ottawa says it has only limited influence with Iran. Ever since Iranian-Canadian freelance photographer Zahra Kazemi died in Iranian custody in 2003, relations between Tehran and Ottawa have been strained.
Ghassemi-Shall, a 42-year-old Toronto shoe salesman, migrated from Iran to Canada after the 1979 Islamic revolution. Since then, he has made several trips back to visit family members. But in 2008, during a visit to his ailing mother, he was detained and charged with espionage. His death sentence was reported in November 2009.
Some suspect his arrest was part of a reprisal against his brother, Alborz, a former naval officer who opposed the regime. Alborz was arrested shortly before Ghassemi-Shall. The evidence used against the two brothers was allegedly an email that Hamid was said to have sent his brother. According to Mega, Hamid neither wrote nor sent the email.
According to Mega, Hamid and Alborz were in solitary confinement for 18 months until the end of November 2009, when the pair was transferred to the general population section in Tehran’s Evin prison. Alborz died January 20, 2010, after interrogation, illness and 20 months in prison.
Iran refuses to recognize dual citizenship, so has denied him access to Canadian officials.
For more information on Ghassemi-Shall’s case, visit: wwwFreeHamid.org.