Cecilia Sala

Cecilia Sala

Italian Journalist

Biography

Cecilia Sala is an Italian journalist known for war correspondence. She reports for the Il Foglio newspaper and does a podcast for Chora Media. She traveled to Iran in December 2024 and reported from Tehran on political developments during the past year. According to the New York Times:

In her coverage, Ms. Sala described how many women were now no longer wearing a hijab in defiance of the country’s leadership, and she interviewed an Iranian stand-up comedian who had been jailed in Iran. . . . In her coverage, Ms. Sala reported not only on the anti-government protests known as the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement, but also on the high levels of inflation plaguing the country. She also focused on how Iran’s “axis of resistance” has been unraveling since the fall of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, an ally of the Islamic Republic.

Arrest

Sala was arrested on December 19, 2024, by intelligence agents of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). She stated after returning to Italy that when she had tried to grab her telephone upon being confronted by the agents, one of the agents threw it across the room.

Iran’s culture ministry said in a statement that she was being held “on charges of violating the laws of the Islamic Republic.”

Sala was arrested three days after the Milan police arrested Iranian Mohammad Abedini Najafabadi, pursuant to a U.S. request. The U.S. has charged Abedini with “conspiring to export sophisticated electronic components from the United States to Iran in violation of U.S. export control and sanctions laws” and “providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization (FTO), that resulted in the deaths of three U.S. service members who were killed by a one-way attack Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), also known as a drone, on a military base in Jordan.”

Treatment in Captivity 

The IRGC intelligence agents who arrested Sala blindfolded her and brought her to Tehran’s notoriously brutal Evin Prison. When Sala asked the agents what she was being accused of doing, she was informed that she had engaged in “many illegal actions in many places.”

Upon her arrival at Evin, Sala was given a hijab and chador to wear and her eyeglasses, without which she is largely unable to see, were taken away. Her cell had no mattress or pillow and the light was on at all times. She was unable to sleep.  She was interrogated almost daily for hours and blindfolded during that time. 

Sala’s captors allowed her to speak periodically with her parents and boyfriend, but when Sala’s mother informed Italian journalists of the conditions Sala was living in, Sala’s interrogator told her that Iran would imprison her for far longer as a consequence. “Their game is to give you hope, and then use your hope to break you,” Sala said after her release.

Sala also stated after her release that while she was in her cell, she heard, according to the New York Times, “sounds of crying, vomiting, footsteps, and banging that sounded as if someone was running and hitting his or her head against the door.” Sala said, “I thought if they don’t take me out, I am going to also end up like this,” adding that she feared that if she was held hostage for long, “I would come back an animal, not a person.”

Release and Prisoner Swap

Sala was sent back to Italy on January 8, 2025. Four days later, Italy released Mohammad Abedini and he returned to Iran. An Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson said that “Abedini was released thanks to the efforts of Iran's diplomatic apparatus.” Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said that Sala’s release resulted from “complex work of diplomatic triangulation with Iran, and obviously also with the United States of America.” According to the New York Times, “A senior Biden administration official said the American government had not been consulted about the negotiations, had not been given advance word about the releases, and disapproved of the deal. John Kirby, the spokesman for the National Security Council, said that the deal had been ‘an Italian decision from soup to nuts.’”

The same Times report, citing unnamed Iranian foreign ministry officials, claimed that Elon Musk had met with Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations and aided in Sala’s release. Sala’s boyfriend had reached out to Musk to seek his help. Meloni later visited then-President-elect Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort and then Musk contacted the Iranian ambassador again. “The most likely reconstruction is that [Meloni] got a signal of understanding from Trump that the incoming administration would not raise huge problems if it released Abedini,” former Italian diplomat Ferdinando Nelli Feroci told the Times. Musk later posted on X, “I played a small role.”

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