If you’ve ever considered making a short jaunt to Iran for summer break, Diego Mathieu has a story that’ll change your mind.
Mathieu, a Belgian, was hitchhiking through Iran’s Great Salt Desert in September 2009 when Iranian officials arrested him and charged him with espionage.
He said he then spent the next three months in an Iranian prison awaiting trial — enduring solitary confinement and psychological torture.
Mathieu’s goal was to hitchhike around the world. He even set up a blog about it.
After arriving in Iran, Mathieu happened upon two other Belgians and planned to meet up with them a few days later. Shortly after, the two other men were arrested after being caught in a restricted area. Mathieu said the men were charged with spying.
And, when Mathieu tried repeatedly to contact his fellow countrymen for the rendezvous, Iranian police tracked his phone calls and jailed him indefinitely for spying just before he made it out of the country.
He said Iranian officials told him he was charged with espionage and accused of taking photos of restricted areas and plotting coordinates with a GPS. For hours, Mathieu said, Iranian officials interrogated him.
“They asked me billions of questions,” he said.
He said he then spent a week in solitary confinement in a jail in Mashhad, Iran before being taken to Section 209 of the Evin Prison in northwestern Tehran, Iran’s capital.
Then he said he spent the next three months of his life in a small cell adjacent to that of a captured American hiker and college student.
“I could hear him singing in his cell,” he said.
He said prison guards offered him a guide book to read after two weeks, but only gave him his glasses to read it after four.
So, even though Mathieu said prisoners weren’t allowed to talk to each other, he picked up bits of information about his American neighbor. He said the American man and two of his friends began traveling from Northern Europe and were arrested in Kurdistan, Iraq.
He said the three American prisoners — Shane Bauer, Sarah Shourd and Josh Fattal — are still imprisoned in Iran.
According to FreeTheHikers.org, a Web site dedicated to the Americans, the three hikers have been imprisoned since July 2009. The Web site offers a petition asking the government of Iran to release Bauer, Shourd and Fattal.
When Mathieu and his Belgian colleagues were finally released, news outlets including Al Jazeera and BBC reported their release.
He said he was released from prison to be formally charged with espionage and go to trial, but it never got that far.
“We were ready to go on trial,” he said. “But at the end they just said, ‘OK, you can go.’”
So Mathieu was free to go in December 2009, and he headed back to Belgium to be with family. He said he never forgot about the American prisoners, especially when he later met up with his good friend Jeff Rich in Albuquerque.
Mathieu is now taking a cross-country journey from Boston to San Francisco. He said he might continue his worldwide journey, but only through the “free world.”
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*To help the American hikers in Iranian prison:
FreeTheHikers.org*
