Ms. Sala was supposed to board her flight back to Italy on Dec. 20, but did not show up at Tehran’s airport, Italy’s foreign ministry said.

Claudio Cerasa, the editor of the Italian newspaper Il Foglio, which Ms. Sala writes for, wrote in an editorial that she was in Iran on a regular visa. Il Post, an Italian news website where Ms. Sala’s partner, Daniele Raineri, works as a journalist, reported that Ms. Sala was in solitary confinement in Evin, a detention facility in Tehran where hundreds of dissidents and political prisoners are held.

Italy’s foreign ministry was negotiating for Ms. Sala’s release.

Iran has routinely incarcerated Iranian reporters. Recently it detained journalists who covered the case of Mahsa Amini, an Iranian woman whose death in police custody ignited fierce anti-government protests in 2022. The country has also jailed foreigners and dual nationals, and human rights groups said many of these detentions were a part of a deliberate policy to extract concessions from foreign countries, including prisoner swaps.

A day before Ms. Sala was arrested in Iran, the police in Milan, Italy, said they had arrested a 38-year-old Iranian man whom the United States accused of providing drone components to the Iran’s Revolutionary Guards — the country’s primary military force. The man faces extradition to the U.S., the Italian police said in a statement.

The statement did not name the man, but earlier that week, the Justice Department charged two men with illegally supplying parts used in an Iranian-backed militia’s drone attack that killed three U.S. service members at an American military base in Jordan in January.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/27/world/middleeast/cecilia-sala-italian-journalist-arrested-iran.html