During this time, he was denied a furlough or visits from family members – the experience was deeply traumatic and made him suicidal.

Ehsan Mehrabi began his journalistic career working for a number of student publications. Shortly after he began reporting, he was suspended for a year from university for publishing a satirical piece that was deemed to be insulting to the Koran. On February 7th 2010, as part of a wave of arrests during the aftermath of the disputed 2009 presidential elections, security forces went to his house and arrested his brother because he was out at the time.

Mehrabi, who was working as a parliamentary reporter for the Farhikhtegan newspaper at the time, knew his brother would remain in detention until he was arrested so he gave himself up - he was taken to Ward 209 of Evin Prison.

“I’d expected them to come,” he later said. “But I still hoped that I might be wrong. It was midnight when the doorbell rang. I didn’t open the door. They must have thought that I had run away so they didn’t force the door open. With the help of a friend I went into hiding. My brother didn’t know that the security forces were after me. He was arrested when he came to my apartment. In order to get my brother released, I handed myself in to security forces.”

Whilst he was in detention, security forces pressurized members of his family. His wife was interrogated at her workplace and his brother was fired from his job on trumped up charges. Mehrabi spent 84 days in detention, 64 days of which were in solitary confinement. In 2012, he posted a blog on the Radio Farda website detailing what had happened to him.

“You hear so frequently that somebody has a heart attack,” he wrote. “Why not you? One doesn’t have the courage to commit suicide but that’s the best you can hope for. You hope that your interrogators aren’t skilled enough and will strike you in a way that nothing can be done but then you go away. It’s past midnight and you’re still awake but your eyelids are a little heavy. You want there to be no morning. Then you hear the sound of the breakfast cartwheels. You open your eyes but you don’t know whether you’ve been asleep. A new day has arrived and you’re still alive. You get up and curse yourself a hundred times for being alive.”

Mehrabi was released on May 2nd 2010, on a bail of approximately $20,000. However, just a few days later, he was called back into the prosecutor’s office at Evin prison and charged with propaganda against the regime for communicating and doing interviews with Persian-language media in foreign countries like the BBC and Radio Farda. He was tried at Branch 28 of the Revolutionary Court presided by Judge Moghisei who sentenced him to a year in prison. The appeals court, presided by Judge Zargar, upheld the verdict and consequently Mehrabi was summoned in to start his sentence.

On December 23rd 2010, he presented himself at Evin Prison and spent nine months at Ward 350, a communal ward for political prisoners. During his incarceration, he was denied a furlough and was not allowed to speak to his family. He was eventually released on October 24th 2011. A month later, he fled Iran for Turkey. Mehrabi now lives in Germany where he works as a journalist.