British couple held in Iran call home for the first time since being detained seven months ago
Lindsay and Craig Foreman, of East Sussex, were detained in January while on a motorcycle tour around the world and later charged with espionage.
They deny the allegations.
The couple have been separated, are being held in different prisons and have access to basic resources, according to their son, Joe Bennett.
Mr Bennett, of Folkestone, Kent, told the BBC he had an eight-minute call with his mother.
He said: 'We laughed, we cried, and for a few brief moments, it felt like the weight of the past seven months lifted.'
He feels his parents are 'holding strong', adding that 'they're resilient, they're positive, and somehow, they're still smiling'.
He also told BBC Radio Kent that British officials saw his father was 'dishevelled and had lost a lot of weight'.
His mother is not walking well due to prison conditions.
The Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office advises British and British-Iranian nationals, who are at significant risk of detention, not to travel to the Middle Eastern country.
A spokesman said: 'We are deeply concerned by reports that two British nationals have been charged with espionage in Iran.
'We continue to raise this case directly with the Iranian authorities.
'We are providing them with consular assistance and remain in close contact with their family members.'
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Metro
2 minutes ago
- Metro
British couple held in Iran over spy charges speak to family after 213 days
Craig and Lindsay Foreman, in Isfahan, before being detained by the Iranian police (Picture: AFP) A British couple have finally been allowed to speak with their family for the first time in 213 days after being charged with espionage in Iran. Lindsay and Craig Foreman, from East Sussex, were detained in January after crossing from Armenia during their global motorcycle tour. The pair deny the allegations, and their family insist they are not spies. Their son Joe Bennett, of Folkestone, in Kent, revealed he had an eight-minute call with his mother – after not having confirmation if she was even alive. He told the BBC: 'We laughed, we cried, and for a few brief moments, it felt like the weight of the past seven months lifted.' Sign up for all of the latest stories Start your day informed with Metro's News Updates newsletter or get Breaking News alerts the moment it happens. Mr Bennett said his parents were 'holding strong,' adding that they remain 'resilient, positive, and somehow, they are still smiling.' He stressed that the call had been a 'real boost' for everyone, but said it was still a 'very traumatic time'. During the phone call, it was revealed that Mr and Ms Foreman had been separated and were being held in what their son described as 'Iran's worst prisons'. The couple have now been separated in two prisons (Picture: AFP) He also told BBC Radio Kent that British officials saw his father was 'dishevelled and had lost a lot of weight'. Meanwhile, his mother is not walking well due to the conditions inside the jail. The update on their plight comes as the Iranian regime executed as many as 29 prisoners in just four days, including one woman. The Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office advises British and British-Iranian nationals, who are at significant risk of detention, not to travel to the Middle Eastern country. A spokesperson said: 'We are deeply concerned by reports that two British nationals have been charged with espionage in Iran. 'We continue to raise this case directly with the Iranian authorities. 'We are providing them with consular assistance and remain in close contact with their family members.' Iran hangs 29 prisoners in 4 days - who are they? Iran's official news agency reported on Wednesday, August 6, the executions of Roozbeh Vadi, 40; Mehdi Asgharzadeh, 35; Ali Rajaei, 33; Reza Sharifzadeh, 35; and Mojtaba Izadi, 35. The last three were executed in Isfahan. Tuesday, August 5, saw the executions of five prisoners: Ali Showkat, 34, in Saveh; Ali Hosseinpour, 35, and Mohammad Abakhti in Karaj; Farzad Yari in Malayer; and Jahanshah Iravani in Semnan. On Monday, August 4, eight prisoners were hanged: Mohammad Golestani, 30; Bahman Pirouzaei, 30; Davoud Najibollahi, 40; and Reza Sarparast, 30, in Mashhad; Matin Shahbazzadeh, 24; Hessam Moloudi, 29; and Enayat Semsari, 36, in Tabriz; and Hamid Soroush in Nur. On Sunday, August 3, 11 prisoners were executed: Meysam Joudi and Sajad Pourdanesh in Karaj; Eghbal Abdali in Ilam; Hassan Ramazani, 28, and a woman in Khorramabad; and five other prisoners whose names were announced in a previous statement. Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@ For more stories like this, check our news page. Arrow MORE: Map shows Thailand-Cambodia border where UK tourists warned to 'take extra care' Arrow MORE: First look inside Putin's secret 'death' factory where teenagers build drones Arrow MORE: Is it safe to travel to Tunisia? Latest advice as UK Foreign Office issues tourist warning
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
‘I must document everything': the film about the Palestinian photographer killed by missiles in Gaza
Israel has sought to pursue its campaign of annihilation against Gaza and its people behind closed doors. More than 170 Palestinian journalists have been killed so far, and no outside reporters or cameras are allowed in. The effects of this policy of concealment – which the Guardian managed to pierce this week with a shocking aerial photograph that made the front page – are to ensure that the outside world only catches sight of Gaza's horrors in small fragments, and to stifle empathy for those trapped inside by hiding them from view, obscuring their humanity. But a new documentary film, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, seeks to open a window to the unfathomable suffering inside Gaza. It focuses on the life of a single young Palestinian woman named Fatma Hassouna, known as Fatem to those close to her. She is 24 years old when we meet her, and has such a broad smile and enthusiasm for life that she compels attention from her first appearance, a few minutes into the film. We see Hassouna's life through the screen of a mobile phone belonging to the director, Sepideh Farsi, and most of the film is made up of the conversations between these two women as they develop an increasingly strong personal bond over the course of a year. The director knows all about conflict and oppression. Farsi is Iranian-born and was a teenager at the time of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. When she was 16 she was imprisoned by the Islamic Republic regime, and she left the country for good two years later, settling in France. She was on tour with her film The Siren, a feature-length animation about the Iran-Iraq war, when the Gaza conflict erupted in October 2023. As the civilian death toll mounted, she found herself unable just to sit on the sidelines, watching endless debates that did nothing to stop the slaughter. 'The common denominator was that there was never the Palestinian voice there,' Farsi says. 'We had different points of views: the American, the European, the Egyptian, the Israeli, but never the Palestinian. It started really bothering me, and at some point I couldn't live with it any more.' In spring last year she flew to Cairo with the idea that she could somehow find a way across the Gaza border to film the war firsthand. That quickly proved a naive and futile mission, so she began filming Gazan refugees in Egypt. One of them suggested to Farsi that if she wanted to talk to someone inside, he could put her in touch with his friend Fatma in the al-Tuffah neighbourhood of Gaza City. We first see Hassouna the way Farsi meets her, on her little phone screen, materialising with green hijab, big glasses and her broad white strip of a smile. They clearly delight in each other's presence from the outset. 'From the first call, I felt that she was someone very special, and that something clicked between the two of us immediately,' Farsi says. 'As soon as we connected, I would be smiling or laughing, and she was the same on her side.' There had been no guarantee the two would get along. Farsi is significantly older, with a daughter Hassouna's age, and she is a cosmopolitan, sophisticated woman who has travelled the world, while Hassouna has been restricted to Gaza all her life. Hassouna is devout while Farsi is profoundly sceptical of any religious talk and challenges her new young friend over what kind of god would allow innocent people to suffer so painfully. However there is far more that draws them together, in ways that are harder to define. 'She had this energy, this shining thing. She was solar,' Farsi says. 'That's the adjective that fits her. Her natural smile. There was this mutual fascination, sorority, comradeship – a mixture of all of these things – and we were happy as soon as we connected.' Farsi makes her phone a portal through which Hassouna recounts her story and the tragedy of Gaza. She talks about her family and introduces her shy brothers to Farsi. She has already made herself a photographer and poet by the time they meet, and Farsi coaches her into being a film-maker and to send out video of the ruination around her. Hassouna is supremely, naturally talented. Her pictures capture the everyday effort of her neighbours trying to survive in the rubble, while her use of language – in her poems and in conversation – is every bit as evocative. The film's title is taken from her passing description of what it is like to venture outside: 'Every second you go out in the street, you put your soul on your hands and walk.' In another conversation, struggling to make sense of what is happening, Hassouna asks: 'We live a very simple life, and they want to take this simple life from us. Why? I'm 24 and I don't have any of the things that I want. Because every time you reach what you want, there's a wall. They put up a wall.' The film should not work. It is determinedly rudimentary, filmed largely on one phone pointed at another. The image of Hassouna sometimes freezes and buffers as the internet connection ebbs and flows. But these glitches draw us in and make us experience the precariousness of their connection. 'That's why I decided to keep this low resolution and not to use a regular camera,' Farsi explains. 'I wanted it to be very low-key technically, to match the connection problems with her, to match the disparity of life here and there.' She had originally attempted a cleanly edited version with all the disconnections cut out. 'It was lacking soul. It didn't breathe. So we put it back in – this brokenness of image and sound.' The sweetness of the relationship at the core of the film is made bittersweet by the constant threat of death around Hassouna. Every so often she reports the death of relatives, or neighbours whose eviscerated homes she points to out of her window. It feels like the encircling darkness is in a direct struggle with Hassouna's smile and her instinctive optimism. Anyone who does not want to know which triumphs in the end should stop reading here. Towards the end of the film, Farsi calls Hassouna to give her the happy news that the film has been selected to be screened at Cannes. They excitedly talk about Farsi obtaining a French visa that might allow Hassouna to get out of Gaza temporarily to attend the festival. While they are talking, the young Palestinian sends the film-maker a photo of her passport. That was 14 April this year. The next day, a Tuesday, Farsi could not get through to Gaza to give Hassouna an update on preparations. 'So I said, 'OK, we'll do it on Wednesday,' the director recalls. 'On Wednesday, I was working on the film on my computer with my phone beside me, and all of a sudden I saw a photo pop up. I opened the notification and saw her photo with a caption saying she had been killed. I didn't believe it. I started calling her frantically, and then called a mutual friend, the one who introduced us, and he confirmed it was true.' In the middle of the night, two missiles fired by an Israeli drone had pierced the roof of her building and burrowed through before detonating, one of them exploding in the family's second floor apartment, the other just below. Fatma Hassouna was killed along with her three brothers and two sisters. Her father died later of his wounds leaving her mother, Lubna, as the sole survivor. The investigative group Forensic Architecture studied the missile strike and declared it a targeted strike aimed at Hassouna for her work as a journalist and witness. Farsi has no doubt. 'She was targeted by the IDF,' she says. 'There were two missiles dropped by a drone on her house. It means they found out where she was living, planned a drone with missiles to go through three storeys of that building and explode on the second floor. It's amazingly well planned in order to eliminate somebody who just does photography. 'I still can't believe it,' Farsi says, speaking from Bogotá, where she is touring with the film, which is now Hassouna's legacy. 'It's three months now, a bit more, and it's still quite unbelievable. For me, she is somewhere out there and I believe I will meet her someday.' In their conversations, Hassouna talked about all the places in the world she dreamed of seeing, while insisting she would always return home to Gaza. Shortly before she died, she told Farsi: 'I have the idea that I must keep going and I must document everything, to be part of this story, to be me!' She imagined passing on her experiences to her children, but instead they have been captured for a cinematic audience, and Hassouna's arresting personality has been preserved at the same time, a portrait of a unique individual among the 60,000 dead. Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk is in UK and Irish cinemas from 22 August. Tickets at
Reuters
5 hours ago
- Reuters
M23 rebels killed 319 civilians in east Congo in July, UN rights chief says
PARIS, Aug 6 (Reuters) - Rwanda-backed M23 rebels killed at least 319 civilians, including 48 women and 19 children, last month in eastern Congo, Volker Turk, U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said on Wednesday, citing "first-hand accounts". The violence in the Rutshuru territory of North Kivu province produced "one of the largest documented death tolls in such attacks since the M23's resurgence in 2022," Turk said in a statement. Reuters first reported on the killings in late July, citing findings by the U.N. Joint Human Rights Office (UNJHRO) that put the death toll at 169 people. M23 leader Bertrand Bisimwa told Reuters at the time it would investigate, but also said the report could be a "smear campaign". A spokesperson for M23, a spokesperson for Rwanda's military and a Rwandan government spokesperson could not immediately be reached for comment on Wednesday. Reuters has not been able to independently confirm the killings, but a local activist cited witnesses as describing M23 combatants using guns and machetes to kill scores of civilians. Two U.N. sources told Reuters that 100 of the dead had been identified by name and that an investigation was ongoing. The M23 and Congolese government have pledged to work towards peace by August 18 after the rebels this year seized more territory than ever before in fighting that has killed thousands and displaced hundreds of thousands more. The UNJHRO findings said M23 targeted suspected members of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), a Congo-based group that includes remnants of Rwanda's former army and militias that carried out the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Turk said on Wednesday the killings had taken place in four villages in Rutshuru from July 9 to July 21 and that most victims were "local farmers camping in their fields during the planting season". Persistent violence in eastern Congo threatens U.S. President Donald Trump's vision for the region, which has been plagued by war for decades and is rich in minerals including gold, cobalt, coltan, tungsten and tin. A peace agreement signed on June 27 in Washington by the Congolese and Rwandan foreign ministers requires Congo to "neutralise" the FDLR as Rwanda withdraws from Congolese territory. Rwanda has long denied helping M23 and says its forces act in self-defence against Congo's army and ethnic Hutu militiamen linked to the 1994 Rwandan genocide, including the FDLR.
