Son of British couple detained in Iran fears they have been abandoned by UK as regime packs jails with protesters
The son of a British couple detained in Iran has said that his parents have been crammed into cells with protesters and offered no clear plan for their release after the embassy closed abruptly over fears of an imminent US attack.
Lindsay and Craig Foreman were arrested while travelling in Iran last January and subsequently charged with espionage, which they deny. They have been held in Tehran’s infamous Evin prison for more than a year.
Ms Foreman’s son, Joe Bennett, said they are living in “hell on repeat”, with cells “overcrowded” because of Iran’s crackdown on nationwide protests.
“It’s beyond imagination,” he told The Independent. “They wake up with rats in their beds. They’ve got rats in the kitchen. It sounds like hell on earth.”
“More have been piled into the rooms so there’s not as much space,” he said, adding that his mother is “not leaving her bed at the moment because there’s just either no room or she doesn’t feel up to it”.
Mr Bennett, from Folkestone in Kent, said that he has been able to call his mother since the demonstrations broke out, and worries that it is becoming a “more dangerous situation”.
“It’s just a constant worry. You hang up the phone and your anxiety goes through the roof because you just don’t know what’s going to happen.”
“There are fights daily and quite explosive ones that I’ve heard when on the phone to her, which must be absolutely petrifying because you not only don’t want to be dragged into it, you don’t know what they’re fighting over. It’s alien.”
He worries that the closure of the embassy has left them without a clear plan for what to do if they are released. He said the Foreign Office told him they were “assessing the situation”.
“There’s a huge possibility that something could happen,” he emphasised. “Something could happen at any point.”
He said he has told his parents, “Just make sure the plan at the moment doesn’t include going to the British Embassy, because they’re not there.”
The ambassador and consular staff were removed on Wednesday following a security assessment as Donald Trump threatened Iran with military action.
Mr Bennett said that he was told that the British authorities would try to organise remote consular assistance while the embassy is closed.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “You can’t provide consular assistance remotely because you can’t go to check their welfare. And there’s no internet. So I don’t quite understand what that means.
