Breaking his silence after he was one of four Americans freed in a prisoner swap with Iran, Pastor Saeed Abedini described the many haunting images of his imprisonment in an exclusive interview with Fox News on Monday. “Actually it was in a courtroom that the judge closed the door and the interrogators started beating me, which in that time I got stomach bleeding”. Abedini said he felt “very heartbroken” to see the battered and bruised fellow prisoner.
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“Saeed Abedini is at the Billy Graham Training Center in Asheville, NC, getting some much-needed rest, taking some time with counselors, and having a chance to reconnect with family”, the 64-year-old evangelist revealed. “He is just realizing the extreme breadth of those following his story and the numbers of people who have been lifting him up in prayer”. While he is convinced he was jailed simply for wearing his faith on his sleeve, he says a judge accused him of “using Christianity to remove the government”. A fifth American, language student Matt Trevithick, 30, was also released but was not part of an exchange deal for USA clemency offered to seven Iranians charged or imprisoned for sanctions violations and the dismissal of charges against 14 Iranians outside the United States.
Saeed Abedini was released January 16, along with Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, former U.S. Marine Amir Hekmati, and Nosratollah Khosravi-Roodsari, apparently a former Federal Bureau of Investigation consultant.
The judge then yelled at him after he told him that he would pray for him. “The best thing I could do over there was [pray]”. “He stood by me and my family and saw us through this ordeal”.
The prisoners were afraid, crying, screaming, forcibly taken by their hands and feet to be hanged, Abedini said, “like when they take a lamb for slaughtering”.
“The worst thing that I saw was when they took some Sunnis for execution”.
Franklin Graham, president and CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, who was one of the leading voices calling for the pastor’s release, said in a statement last week that no one in America can “begin to understand or appreciate what Saeed has endured after being imprisoned in Iran because of his Christian faith”. She cancelled plans to visit him in Germany, where he was treated at a US military hospital before his January 21 arrival in the USA, to give him more time to recover before reuniting with their children Rebekkah and Jacob.
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“My first thought was the kids”, Saeed’s wife, Naghmeh, told KBOI-TV. She said in a message to supporters that became public that her husband had been abusive and suffered from a pornography addiction. She expressed regret for sending the emails and declined to discuss the specifics of the abuse.
