Update given on UK motorcycling couple detained in Iran
Lindsay and Craig Foreman were arrested while motorcycling in Iran eight months ago. Their family offers an update on their situation.
The family of a British motorcycling couple arrested in Iran are keeping up the pressure on diplomatic officials, stressing that the couple’s situation is “dire.”
Lindsay and Craig Foreman had been travelling the world on two wheels when they were arrested in the country in January and charged with espionage. The Foremans say they are not guilty of any wrongdoing.
Their son, Joe Bennett, is exactly the kind of son you’d want if you had been detained by an authoritarian theocratic regime. He and the rest of the family have been pushing hard to keep diplomatic officials’ attention on the case.
“We have to keep pressing for their release,” he told BBC South East this week. “They need urgent support, not just words.”
Offering an update on his parents’ condition, Bennett said that the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) had managed to transfer money into his father’s account to purchase food and essentials.
According to Bennett, detainees in Iran's prison system “must rely on money credited to their accounts to buy food, clean water and hygiene products.” Up until just recently, only his mother had been able to receive such funds.
Despite this development, Bennett says Lindsay and Craig’s situation is anything but cheery.
His father is “sharing a single room with 57 men stacked into bunks three high, with little access to fresh air, poor diet and no mattress.” Whereas his mother has been “crammed into unimaginable conditions with around 70 women in a chaotic area of 140 square metres.”
Bennett says his father is also having to suffer through an untreated dental issue, while his mother has to endure “unbearable heat, poor and limited food, [and] sleeping on a metal bunk that leaves her in constant back pain.”
Bennett acknowledged, however, that the FDCO - the government department tasked with a number of diplomatic responsibilities, including the protection of the interests of British citizens overseas - had achieved some wins. The couple are allowed to see each other once a week, and Lindsay Foreman is allowed to call her husband more frequently than that.
The FDCO has not commented publicly on the Foremans' case - nor would one expect it to do so. Diplomacy is a tricky thing and, as the case of Briton Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe (detained in Iran from 2016 to 2022) demonstrated, statements from officials can sometimes hurt more than they help.
That is almost certainly a frustration for the Foremans’ family, however.
“Right now, their dignity is being denied,” Bennett told the BBC. “Their resilience is extraordinary, but resilience should never be mistaken for acceptable conditions”
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Chris Cope is a fourth-generation journalist, originally from Texas. He has lived in the UK for roughly two decades and has been writing about motorcycles for most of that time. He has written for dozens of publications and websites in the UK, US, Canada, and Australia.
