Kylie Moore-Gilbert is pictured after she was released
Credit: REUTERS
Kylie Moore-Gilbert described her 804-day confinement in a notorious Iranian prison as “psychological torture” that caused her to contemplate suicide before her November 26 release.
"I felt if I have to endure another day of this — you know if I could, I would just kill myself,” Dr Moore-Gilbert, 33, said during her first interview since leaving Iran, where she was detained in Tehran’s Evin prison.
The British-Australian academic was arrested in November 2018 and handed a ten year prison sentence on contested spying charges. Dr Moore-Gilbert was released as part of a prisoner swap two years later.
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the British-Iranian charity worker detained for espionage charges, has too faced a stint in Evin prison in which she went on “hunger strike” against the deplorable conditions.
Dr Moore-Gilbert said she spent seven harrowing months in solitary confinement, trapped in freezing rooms with no distraction from “psychological torture”.
Kylie Moore-Gilbert’s ordeal began when an informant accused her of being suspicious
Credit: PA
For the first four weeks she was placed in an “extreme solitary confinement” cell with no access to light.
It was “designed to break you,” Dr Moore-Gilbert said. “It’s psychological torture. You go completely insane.”
Dr Moore-Gilbert added that her only moments of hope were when she heard birds flying by outside, or when daylight came through a crack in the wall.
“It is so damaging. I would say I felt physical pain from the psychological trauma I had in that room,” she told Sky News.
“It’s a two-by-two-metre box. There is no toilet, there is no television. There is nothing whatsoever other than a phone on the wall for calling the guards.”
Dr Moore-Gilbert described deplorable living conditions and military blankets stained with other people’s dirt as her only barrier from the cold.
“I had to use one as a pillow, one as a mattress and one to cover myself so I wouldn’t be cold yet I was still cold.”
Passengers, including British-Australian academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert, disembark from an Australian Government jet after arriving at Canberra Airport
Credit: Lukas Coch /AAPImage
Dr Moore-Gilbert’s ordeal began when an informant accused her of being suspicious, in part because she was married to a Russian-Israeli.
The lecturer in Islamic Studies had been attending a conference in Qom, but Iran’s Revolutionary Guards stopped her from boarding her flight back to Melbourne.
Officials in Tehran insist the Cambridge graduate worked for Mi6 and Israeli intelligence services.
In letters smuggled out of Evin prison in 2020, Dr Moore-Gilbert wrote that she had declined the offer of a reduced sentence in return for becoming an Iranian spy.
“I knew the reason that they didn’t engage in any meaningful negotiations with the Australians [to release her] was because they wanted to recruit me, they wanted me to work for them as a spy,” Dr Moore-Gilbert confirmed in her interview with Sky News.
She added that Iran was interested in using her academic status to travel “to other Middle Eastern countries and perhaps European countries, perhaps America, and collecting information for them there”.
Richard Ratcliffe protests outside Iranian Embassy in London with Gabriella Ratcliffe, daughter of British-Iranian aid worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe
Credit: ANDREW BOYERS /REUTERS
Dr Moore-Gilbert’s detainment has often drawn comparisons to that of Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe.
The British mother faced five years in prison for espionage charges and was released from house arrest in Tehran on Sunday.
But Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s hopes of returning to Britain were crushed when she was given an immediate summons to appear in court later this week.
The second set of charges have been repeatedly threatened throughout her prison sentence.
They are based on claims that she worked with BBC Persian to train journalists and was part of a demonstration outside the Iranian embassy in 2009.
Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s husband believes the detainment is the country’s response to a £400m debt linked to a 1970s arms purchase, acknowledged by the UK, but impossible to pay due to sanctions on Iran.
“She is very pleased this afternoon to be without an ankle tag, so for now we are just enjoying that,” Richard Ratcliffe said. “But we will have to see what next week brings — clearly she is still being held as leverage over the UK.”
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