Iranian regime tried to recruit Australian academic detained as spy

The Australian-British scholar Kylie Moore-Gilbert, released in November after two years of detention in Iran, said the Tehran regime tried to recruit her as a spy, during an interview with the channel Sky News Australia.

“I knew the reason they didn’t enter into meaningful negotiations with the Australians (for my release) was that they wanted to recruit me, they wanted me to work for them as a spy.” commented the University of Melbourne scholar, who was sentenced in Iran to ten years in prison for espionage.

“(They told me) that if I cooperated with them and agreed to become a spy for them, they would set me free. I could have obtained my freedom, I could have made an agreement with them ”, The Middle East expert underlined, during the first interview given since his release and broadcast last night exclusively by Sky News.

Moore-Gilbert, who was reportedly traded for three Iranian prisoners convicted of terrorism in Thailand, although the Australian government denies it, expressed frustration at Canberra’s low-key diplomacy over his case, which became known to the press a year after his detention.

“The government’s line was that trying to find a behind-the-scenes diplomatic solution with Iran was the best approach to freeing me, and that the media would complicate matters and could anger and enrage Iran, and make matters worse for me. . . “, he expressed.

The British Australian also described the “psychological torture” to which she was subjected in an isolation cell at Evin Prison in Tehran, where she suffered long anxiety and panic attacks and even had want to kill herself, even though “of course she never did. tried and never taken that step ”.

But, “I have never been physically tortured with the things you think about, like pulling my nails or being electrocuted. It never happened to me, but they beat me once and forcibly injected me with a tranquilizer syringe against my will and it was in early 2020 ”.

The Moore-Gilbert interview comes the same week that British-Iranian Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was released after serving her five-year prison sentence for alleged espionage in Iran.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe, whose situation remains delicate in the face of new legal proceedings, is an employee of the Thomson Reuters Foundation and detained in 2016 during a family visit to Tehran.

(With information from EFE)

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