Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said Saturday that efforts to free Italian journalist Cecilia Sala from prison in Iran are “complicated.”
Salah was detained by police in Tehran on December 19 and, according to his employer, is being held in the city’s notorious Evin prison.
“We are trying to resolve a complex issue and in the meantime want to ensure that Cecilia Sala is detained in the best possible conditions,” Tajani said.
Asked when he might be released, he said, “I hope soon, but it’s not up to us.”
“He has obviously been detained, which is not ideal, but he is fed and kept in the same cell,” he said.
Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s office said she was “following the complex case closely”, and that Rome was pursuing “all possible avenues of negotiation” to bring Sala home “as soon as possible”.
Chora Media, an Italian podcast publisher for which Sala worked, said she had traveled from Rome to Iran on December 12 on a journalist visa and was due to return on December 20.
But she left quietly on 19 December and did not board her flight again. Soon after, he called his mother and told her that he had been arrested.
“He was taken to Evin prison, where dissidents are held, and the reason for his arrest has not yet been formally disclosed,” Chora Media said in a statement on Friday.
Sala also worked for an Italian newspaper Il FoglioWhich said she went to Iran “to report on a country she knows and loves.”
It said, “Journalism is not a crime, even in countries that repress all freedoms, including those of the press. Bring him home.”
Sala, who is listed as 29 years old, last posted on X on December 17 with a link to a podcast titled “A conversation on patriarchy in Tehran.”
She previously reported from Ukraine.
