By Pishtaz | 2025-01-07

Foreign visitors to Iran, particularly journalists and dual nationals, risk becoming game pieces to be used in Tehran's international negotiations as part of a calculated system of 'hostage diplomacy,' as two recent cases reveal.

As Italian journalist Cecilia Sala marks her first month in Tehran's notorious Evin Prison, Spanish hiker and football fan Santiago Sánchez Cogedor celebrates one year of freedom after 15 harrowing months in Iranian detention.

Cogedor's ordeal, documented by AFP, began in October 2022 during what should have been an adventurous walk from Spain to Qatar for the World Cup.

His family lost all trace of him some weeks before the tournament started.

A voicemail to his parents later broadcast by a television station said he was in Tehran headed for the port of Bandar Abbas, in the Strait of Hormuz, from where he intended to take a boat for Qatar.

Then came the silence.

"The worst were the first months because nobody knew if he was alive or dead," his mother Celia told reporters.

It later emerged that Iranian authorities had detained Cogedor after he visited the burial site of Mahsa Amini amid nationwide protests following her death in "morality police" custody.

The government's response included mass crackdowns and the arrest of several foreigners, whom they accused of having links to the protests.

Diplomatic pawns

Among the foreigners being held in the Iranian regime's prisons are French teachers Cécile Kohler and Jacques Paris, German-Iranian national Nahid Taghavi and British-Iranian labor rights activist Mehran Raoof.

While Tehran maintains these detentions are legally justified, international governments and human rights groups consistently denounce them as "hostage diplomacy" for political and economic leverage.

Speaking to BBC-Spanish after his return to Spain, Cogedor described his imprisonment in Evin Prison's Section 209 as "a place of suffering from another planet."

He endured days in a windowless cell without a bathroom, and was allowed outside just once weekly, blindfolded.

"I even talked to the ants there," he said. "I went through things I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy."

As Cogedor found freedom, Sala became entangled in Tehran's web.

Despite holding a valid Iranian-issued journalist visa, she was detained in December on vague charges of "violating the laws of the Islamic Republic" – a move that underscores the Iranian regime's persistent strategy.