CENTRAL NEWS
French-Iranian citizen and anthropologist Fariba Abdelkhah and Australian researcher Kylie Moore-Gilbert, who was imprisoned in Iran on December 24, announced that they launched an indefinite hunger and thirst strike.
Both researchers said that they have launched a hunger strike on behalf of all the researchers and academics in Iran and the Middle East who have been unjustly imprisoned.
Academics who sent letters from Evin prison in Tehran, where they were held, stated that the charges against them were “fabricated accusations” and that they were subjected to psychological torture and human rights violations.
Fariba Abdelkhah, director of research at the Center for International Studies at the Faculty of Political Sciences in Paris, has been under arrest since June. The Iranian government does not accept the dual citizenship of the researcher. Abdelkhah, in the hands of the Revolutionary Guards, is accused of espionage.
Kylie Moore-Gilbert, an Australian expert in protest movements, is known as a researcher at the University of Melbourne. Moore-Gilbert, who has been under arrest since September 2018, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for espionage.
In October 2019, a French researcher named Roland Marchal was arrested. It is not known why Marchal was arrested. France has previously requested the release of the researcher many times. Both French detainees could be used by Iran as part of negotiations on nuclear weapons or as bargaining material in exchange for the release of an Iranian nuclear expert detained in France who is wanted for extradition by the United States.
An American student, who had been detained for three years, was released in early December in a trade exchange between Washington and Tehran. The US also lifted the charges against an Iranian scientist arrested last year.
