Jason Rezaian demands $1 billion in compensation from Iran
The former Washington Post reporter in Iran said in the first hearing of his appeal that his interrogators had made it clear that they had used him as leverage during his imprisonment. Jason Rezaian was imprisoned for a year and a half.
Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian appeared in federal court on Tuesday, January 8, and said the Iranian government used his arrest and 18-month imprisonment as leverage in nuclear negotiations with the West.
According to the Associated Press, Rezaian told the court that his interrogators forced him to confess to espionage under severe psychological pressure during his imprisonment.
Rezaian also testified that his interrogators had openly admitted that they were using him for political bargaining and would release him from prison only when “the Americans give them what they want.”
Rezaian, 43, was born in the United States to an American mother and an Iranian father and holds dual citizenship. Before his arrest, he worked as a reporter for The Washington Post in the newspaper's Tehran bureau.
Rezaian and his wife, Yeganeh Salehi, were arrested by security agents in their home in the summer of 2014. Yeganeh Salehi was released on bail two months later, but his wife was in prison for a year and a half on charges of “espionage and acting against national security.”
Jason Rezaian was released on January 16, 2016, at the same time as the Iranian and American foreign ministers were in Vienna to read the JCPOA implementation statement. At that time, several other Iranian-American prisoners were also released from prison in the United States in a group exchange of Iranian prisoners.
Request for compensation
Jason Rezaian and his family are demanding $1 billion in compensation from the Iranian government in their lawsuit.
According to the Associated Press, Rezaian told the judge that while in prison he was regularly interrogated, subjected to psychological torture and threatened with execution. Rezaian said the evidence presented against him during his interrogation and trial consisted primarily of articles he wrote for the Washington Post or interviews he conducted with government officials and civil society activists.
Rezaian said that the first time he met with the judge in his case, the judge said he would sentence him to death.
He added that he confessed to espionage during interrogations, but during his trial in court he explicitly emphasized that these confessions were extracted from him under severe psychological torture.
Jason Rezaian returned to the United States after his release from prison and now lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife and works for the Washington Post.
He told a federal judge that he still suffers from the psychological stress and anxiety caused by his time in Iran, where he was interrogated and imprisoned. “I’m better now than when I was released from prison, but I’m still not the same person I was before I was arrested,” Rezaian said.
The Iranian government has not officially or publicly responded to Jason Rezaian's lawsuit to this day. No lawyer or representative from the Iranian government was present during Rezaian's court hearing on Tuesday.
Source: DW
