Ahmady said that after his arrest in 2019, he was held in solitary confinement for three months in Evin prison, north of Tehran, and blindfolded during repeated interrogations. The confinement was so painful, he said, that he longed for interrogation, since it was the only form of human contact he received.
“You have just become mentally handicapped, insensitive to your environment,” Ahmady told British broadcaster Channel 4.
Mr. Ahmady, of Kurdish ethnicity, was born in northwest Iran and received British citizenship in the 1990s. He published several reports and books on genital mutilation and child marriage in Iran. In a report published in 2015, he wrote that mutilation genital was “embedded in the social fabric of Iranian culture” in at least four provinces.
“I am sure that my prison sentence is a tool for the Iranian security services and the justice ministry to intimidate and pressure the few remaining people who are working on social issues,” Ahmady said in a statement posted on his website on Wednesday .
According to local reports in December, prosecutors in Tehran accused him of working together with the United States and others, charges he denied.
More than half a dozen foreigners and dual nationals are being held in Iranian prisons, including Ms. Zaghari-Ratcliffe; Fariba Adelkhah, a Franco-Iranian academic; Siamak Namazi, a businessman, and his father, Baquer Namazi, a former Unicef employee, both Iranian-Americans; Dr. Ahmad Reza Jalali, a Swedish-Iranian doctor and researcher; Nahid Taghavi, a German-Iranian architect; and Morad Tahbaz, an Iranian-American environmentalist.
Kylie Moore-Gilbert, a British-Australian academic who was arrested in 2018 on charges of spying for Israel, was released in December in a prisoner exchange with three Iranian men.
Farnaz Fassihi contributed reports.