Italy – La Voce Di Novara, Nov. 04, 2025
“Daddy can’t come home. He’s in Iran helping people sick with Covid.” For years, this little white lie helped Ariou — once a small boy — cope with the absence of his father, Ahmadreza. But now it’s no longer enough; it can’t explain the long silences, the months without even a single phone call.
Ahmadreza Djalali, a researcher and physician specializing in disaster medicine, has taught in Belgium, Sweden, and Italy. Since 2016, he has been detained in Evin Prison after being arbitrarily arrested during a work trip to Iran and later accused of spying for Israel — a recurring false accusation used by Iranian authorities to justify unlawful imprisonments with fabricated evidence. In a letter written from prison in 2017, Djalali revealed that he had refused to collaborate with Iranian intelligence services, enduring torture, threats, and long periods of solitary confinement.
Today, Djalali is 54 years old. He has a wife, two children, and a life that, for nearly a decade, has endured an unending nightmare of physical and psychological torture, illness, and deprivation. During his imprisonment, he has suffered heart failure, chronic gastritis, gallstones, tooth and vision loss, severe weight loss, and crippling anxiety and depression. He has survived a prison riot, a fire, a pandemic, and even a brief war between Iran and Israel, during which, in June 2025, Evin Prison was bombed.
On June 23 of this year, during Israeli air raids on Tehran, parts of the prison were hit. In the following days, dozens of political prisoners — including Djalali — were taken from their cells and transferred to unknown locations. From the next day onward, there was no news. Neither his family nor the Swedish Embassy received any communication. According to Amnesty International, such silence is standard practice by the Iranian regime when it intends to carry out executions or impose total isolation.
