Belgian MP Darya Safai who escaped Iran ‘torture’ prison reveals IRGC abduction plot

She explained: "The Islamic republic found I am trouble for them. They want to bring me to Iran. They want to take me as a hostage like they have done to several people before me."

Safai has long been calling for the IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) to be designated as a terrorist organisation in the EU. The abduction alert came shortly after Safai announced in Belgian parliament that the government backs her calls to do this.  

After she made the announcement, she took to X to say: "For a long time now, I have been making great efforts to convince everyone, and certainly the Belgian government, that the IRGC is a terrorist organization that belongs on the terror list.”

For 25 years, Safai has been outspoken in her disdain for the Iranian regime—both in parliament and to her large social media following.

Recently, she openly backed Israel’s strike on the Iranian nuclear site and also posted a picture online of her and Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last Shah, who was ousted in the 1979 Islamic Revolution. 

Iran has denied that there ever was a plan to kidnap Safai. Rabat Jazi of Iran's EU mission posted on X that her claim was "a new cheap and stylish way of playing grandiose and pleasing your genocidal apartheid boss: just act delusional and hallucinate that you were going to be abducted by a phantom enemy, no matter how ridiculous it might appear."

Iranian newspaper Tehran Times  accused Safai of making the claims to gain attention amid her calls for the IRGC to be proscribed.

In her exclusive interview with the JC, she explained the background to her claims. 

"They want to break you and make you someone new," she said, recounting her time in  an Iranian prison.  “They beat the people. They violate the women. They do everything that they can to torture you."

Safai, who was born in Iran, was in her early 20s and in her final year of her dentistry degree at the University of Terhan. She had just got married to Saeed Bashirtash, the leader of a student campaigning group of which she became a part.

She was imprisoned after an anti-regime protest, sparked by the shutdown of a reformist newspaper.

Although she was caught and sentenced to two years in prison, the authorities failed to track down her husband – a fact that would later become her ticket to freedom.

Shoved into a two-metre by two-metre room, Safai, fearing she would be executed, wondered if she would ever get her life back.

"I thought 'will I ever again be free?'" she recalled. "You cannot imagine what freedom is. It's not talked about. It's 'can I go outside this room?' It's 'can I see the sky – this blue sky that is above your head?'"

After just less than a month, Safai was freed on a large bail. She believes the real reason was because authorities hoped that once released, she would lead them to her husband Bashirtash. Instead, she and her husband managed to flee the country for Europe.

In Belgium, she set up a new life, working as a dentist and later  entering politics. Eventually she became a member of the Belgian federal parliament.

Instead of turning her back on her old country, she has focused her life on trying to change it.

"Iran is my beautiful country and I'm fighting to make it free," she said.

Speaking of the Iranian regime’s “monstrous machine,” she described the human rights abuses it routinely commits – denying fair trials, executing prisoners at will, and, most disturbingly, “raping virgin girls awaiting the death penalty” to ensure they “don’t die a virgin,” which, under Islamic teaching, would otherwise grant them entry to heaven.

Safai is desperate to help bring change to her homeland and explained how since fleeing, she has never for one second thought "now I'm free, now I can make money, now I am in a free country".

"It's my duty to give my whole life to saving those people."
Safia went on to talk about her fears amid rising anti-Israel sentiment around the globe and the recent 12-days of conflict between the Jewish state and Iran. Specifically, she worries that growing Israel-hatred could push people into siding with the Islamic Republic.

She said: "People around the world are naive to think they should side against Israel. They are under this strange illusion that Israel is the enemy of the West and therefore every enemy of Israel is an ally.

"People don't realise that places like Iran are far from allies of the West. They are terrorist states. Siding with countries like that is so dangerous."

Speaking about Israel's bombing of the Iranian nuclear sites, she said: "I am telling the whole world that Israel didn't have any choice.

"[US President Donald Trump] gave the Iranian regime 60 days to negotiate. Negotiating doesn't mean anything for the Iranian regime. It didn't produce any results. What do you expect? You want to sit still until they have nuclear weapons? No.

"I supported this attack, and this was not an attack on Iran; it was not an attack on Iranian people; it was an attack on the killers of Iranian people. It was eliminating the enemies of Iran to save the beautiful Iran from the monsters of this machine. That is what this attack was about."

Turning her attention to the rising international support for Palestine, she said: "When some of the gay pride campaigners wave the Palestinian flag in the name of solidarity with Palestine, I just look at them and [think] 'Do they know they don't have the right to exist in an Islamic country? Do they know what Islamic ideology says about them?' They don't even look at them as humans. They look at them as animals. This is just sad. They don't know what's going on, what they are creating – how dangerous it is."

She is also concerned that Belgium may join the growing list of countries deciding to recognise Palestine as a state.

She said: "Recognising Palestine as a state, what does it solve? Does it solve any problem that we have in the region? Does it even help the Palestinian people? I don't think so.

"What we are now doing in my opinion Is rewarding terrorists like Hamas. It's not at all what I believe in.

"Did Hamas give the hostages back? Did they stop fighting? What did it change [to make us now] reward them?"

She reflected that even a quarter of a century after escaping the prison, “Still, when I’m out running, I look up to see there is a sky. It reminds me that I am free.”