Smuggled letters of Australian academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert revealed as Marise Payne meets with Iranian counterpart

Marise Payne has met with her Iranian counterpart to discuss the case of Kylie Moore-Gilbert as The Australian publishes the jailed Australian academic’s smuggled letters.

Kylie Moore-Gilbert has been convicted by Tehran of spying.

Australian government authorities have revealed Foreign Minister Marise Payne met with her Iranian counterpart in person to discuss the case of Kylie Moore-Gilbert, as the jailed Australian academic’s smuggled letters from her prison cell are published.

Dr Moore-Gilbert, a lecturer in Islamic studies at the University of Melbourne, was arrested in September 2018 while at an educational conference and was convicted of espionage.

The Australian government has previously stated that it does not accept the spying charges against Dr Moore-Gilbert and it has been attempting to secure her release via diplomatic channels.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade confirmed that Senator Payne’s latest attempt to negotiate for Dr Moore-Gilbert’s release occurred in New Delhi on January 16.

“The Foreign Minister has raised the case with her Iranian counterpart, Foreign Minister Zarif, in letters and face-to-face meetings, including as recently as their meeting on 16 January in New Delhi,” a spokesman said.

“While we continue to work towards her release, we are doing everything possible in relation to the conditions of her imprisonment.”

Mobile users: Click here to read Kylie Moore-Gilbert’s letters

Dr Moore-Gilbert is being held in the Evin prison in Tehran, which is notorious for its cruel and unusual treatment of inmates.

A cache of ten letters, understood to have been written by her in crude Farsi between June and December last year, were secretly sneaked out of the prison and passed, via an intermediary who translated them, to The Times. The Australian has also received copies of the letters.

The British-Iranian woman Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe has also been held in Evin prison since her arrest in 2016 over spying allegations that she denies.

In her letters Dr Moore-Gilbert, who also has British nationality and was educated at Cambridge, begged to leave the most restrictive prison unit where she has served periods in solitary confinement and detailed the privations that she has suffered while incarcerated. The letters are variously addressed to three individuals: a man named Mr Vasiri, believed to be a deputy prosecutor in the Iranian judiciary, and a Mr Ghaderi and Mr Hosseini, who are thought to be mid-ranking officers in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Dr Moore-Gilbert referred to meetings with these men and it appears they have influenced her treatment in prison, including gaining her access to books. Her section of the prison is run by the IRGC, while her case is managed by the judiciary.

Accusing the corps of “playing an awful game with me”, she described being shown two conflicting sentences – one outlining 13 months’ imprisonment and the other a decade-long term.

Kylie Moore-Gilbert is an expert on the Middle East for the University of Melbourne.

In a letter written last July she said: “I’m taking psychiatric medications, but these 10 months that I have spent here have gravely damaged my mental health. I am still denied phone calls and visitations, and I am afraid that my mental and emotional state may further deteriorate if I remain in this extremely restrictive detention ward.”

In August she wrote that her health has deteriorated significantly. “In the past month I have been to the special care at ‘Baghiatollah Hospital’ twice and the prison infirmary six times,” the letters state. “I think I am in the midst of a serious psychological problem.”

The same month she threatened to embark on a hunger strike and said she would refuse her medication.

Elsewhere, she described having insufficient funds in her prison account to pay for personal care items, medicine and food, explaining she had allergies that meant she could not eat the ordinary prison meals. She said that “kind cellmates” had stepped in on several occasions to help to buy her necessities. A copy of a letter she had sent to her Iranian case manager stated her “official and definitive rejection of your offer to me to work with the intelligence branch of IRGC”.

She said: “I am not a spy. I have never been a spy and I have no interest to work for a spying organisation in any country.” Dr Moore-Gilbert repeatedly emphasised her innocence, stating that she had been the victim of “fabrications and trumped-up accusations”.

On Monday, pressure was heaped on the British and Australian governments to step up their diplomatic efforts to secure the freedom of Dr Moore-Gilbert and other citizens jailed in Iran.

Tulip Siddiq, Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s MP, said: “This is another harrowing example of government allowing innocent British citizens to languish in Iran. Both governments should be working to do more to get these women home.”

The Australian embassy was barred from making a consular visit to Dr Moore-Gilbert during the six-month period covered in her letters, but DFAT confirmed that consular officials

visited Dr Moore-Gilbert on December 17 and January 16 and said that the Foreign Minister was pushing for the right for future visits to occur “without unreasonable delay”.

“We have attended two consular visits in two months and we regard that as an example of important progress that we want to see continue,” said a spokesman.

“We continue to believe that the best way to secure a successful outcome is through diplomatic channels and not through the media.”

The UK government has also raised concerns about Dr Moore-Gilbert’s welfare with a British Foreign Office spokesman saying: “We remain extremely concerned about the welfare of British dual nationals detained in Iran. The prime minister raised these concerns with President Rouhani on January 9, and the foreign secretary did so with foreign minister Zarif on January 6.”

The Times attempted to reach Dr Moore-Gilbert’s family and the Iranian embassy in London for comment.

The psychological strain of solitary confinement in Iran’s most notorious prison appears to have taken its toll on Dr Moore-Gilbert. On top of enduring the “extremely restrictive detention ward” known as 2-A in Evin jail in Tehran, she says that she has also fought suspected mind games by her captors.

The source who produced the translation said that the letters were written in rudimentary Farsi, were strewn with grammatical errors and had probably been composed using a dictionary. It is thought that Dr Moore-Gilbert, who was fluent in Arabic, taught herself some of the basics of the language during her detention.

Her access to books has not been straightforward, the letters say. She was denied a stack that were ordered for her by the Australian embassy in Iran, prompting her to plead for help last June.

“My case manager has taken the books hostage in order to put psychological pressure on me,” she wrote. “These books belong to the embassy and the judge has explicitly ordered that they should be given to me (the same goes for an English copy of the Koran, which DOES exist inside Ward A-2 – I know).”

Kylie Moore-Gilbert in interviewed on camera about the Middle East.

She added: “Please help me retrieve these books from the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps], and please don’t listen to the excuses and lies of my ‘case expert’.

“In addition, in the past three months I have only had one four-minute phone call with my family. The judge has allowed me phone calls as well, but I was still denied phone calls.”

Dr Moore-Gilbert, a lecturer at the University of Melbourne, feared she was being manipulated with conflicting verdicts on her jail term after her July conviction for spying.

In a letter dated November 22, she said: “Today I was shown two different appeal decisions: one indicating a 13-month sentence, and the other confirming my initial verdict of ten years. My case manager said that the 13-months decision was ‘fake’, and was an illegal attempt by my lawyer and my ambassador to free me from prison. On the other hand the security officer at Ward 2-A told me that the 13-months appeal decision had been relayed through official channels to them.” She added: “How is it possible for this to have been faked, and how is it possible that two very different appeal decisions were delivered to 2-A detention centre?!

“I am an innocent victim. I have suffered 14 months in this temporary detention centre without any justification, and my tolerance for such a game is really low at the moment.”

There is little information in the public sphere about Dr Moore-Gilbert’s early life, but it has been reported that she grew up in Bathurst in New South Wales. She read Middle Eastern studies as an undergraduate at Cambridge University and was awarded a master’s.

Contemporaries recalled her fondly and said she was “extremely studious”. Her former flatmate told The Times: “I remember her as being down to earth, friendly and softly spoken. She liked keeping fit.”

Siobhan Hynes, 31, who lived with Dr Moore-Gilbert in 2012 and 2013 after meeting via a group of mature students, said: “She was always warm to me despite how stressful the course could be.

“We stayed in touch until she disappeared off social media. I now know that’s because of what happened in Iran … I’m really worried about her.”

Her academic work focused on revolutions, protest movements and activism in the Middle East, including links to Shia Islam – subjects seen as highly sensitive in Iran. Her visit 16 months ago was prompted by an invitation from a university, reports said.

Her colleagues in Melbourne insist that she was an academic – not a spy.

The Times