Jailed adventurers dreamt of ending stigma around Iran
When Jolie King and Mark Firkin resolved to quit the ‘‘nine-to-five corporate grind’’, pack up their lives in Australia and travel the world, they decided to film their journey to prove that maligned nations are suitable for tourism.
‘‘Our biggest motivation behind the vlogs [video blogs] is to hopefully inspire anyone wanting to travel, and also try to break the stigma around travelling to countries which get a bad rap in the media,’’ the couple wrote online. It may have been while trying to capture aerial footage for one video in Iran, a country renowned for its unpredictable behaviour towards foreigners, that they were arrested about ten weeks ago.
The editor of Manoto TV, a Persian-language broadcaster based in London, has reported that the couple were arrested for flying a drone near Tehran without a licence. Since then King, a British-Australian, and Firkin, an Australian, have been in jail. They have not stood trial, the editor wrote online.
The turn of events is a dismal end to a ‘‘life-changing adventure’’ that began in summer 2017 after they had saved up funds, including from the sale of furniture, and left home in Cottesloe, Western Australia, on a journey to Britain.
After island-hopping to southeast Asia, they drove in a modified Toyota Land Cruiser through India, Pakistan, China and other Asian countries before arriving in Iran. On June 30 they posted a video from their first day there. ‘‘We’re now in Iran and we’re camped on a nice hill here next to the capital Tehran,’’ Firkin said. ‘‘We just arrived. It’s actually really beautiful,’’ King added.
She is being held in the same women’s political prisoner wing in Evin jail as Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, 41, a British-Iranian mother of one who has been held since 2016 on spying charges.
A second British-Australian woman, an academic who studied at Cambridge University, is in solitary confinement after a separate incident, it is believed. The Times has chosen not to name her at the request of the Foreign Office.
The Australian government is spearheading consular efforts in all three cases but Boris Johnson and Dominic Raab plan to confront the Iranians over their detention of Britons at a UN meeting in New York this month. The foreign secretary made the promise in a letter, seen by The Times and sent last week to three Labour MPs who represent constituents detained in Iran. ‘‘We will not accept Iran using our citizens as diplomatic leverage,’’ Raab wrote.
Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, said yesterday (Wednesday): ‘‘The message to Iran is to follow the international rule of law ... and to release people that have been detained in the way they have been over the last couple of years.’’
The Iranian authorities have told King that she is being detained in hope of a prisoner swap, a source familiar with her case told The Times. While the Iranian government has not publicly commented on the arrests, in April the foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif proposed swapping Zaghari-Ratcliffe for Negar Ghodskani, 40, an Iranian woman who is in jail in the US. She pleaded guilty last month to a conspiracy to evade US sanctions and illegally export controlled technology.
The Australian government said that it was assisting the families of three Australians detained in Iran. – The Times