The British couple - Lindsay and Craig Foreman, both 53 - had phone contact with their family until a few days ago. Not any more. They were arrested in Iran in January 2025 while travelling around the world on motorcycles. They have been sentenced to 10 years in prison for alleged espionage. They are being held in the „Evin" prison in Tehran - known worldwide as a place many don't come out of.

The family - son Joe Bennett in particular - hasn't heard from his mother in over a week. According to NGOs working on their release, the Iranian authorities cut the phone access as a „response" to a media interview in which the couple said they felt „abandoned" and that the odds of freedom are shrinking.

„We don't know if my mother and Craig are safe," Bennett said. A sentence that to British audiences sounds dramatic; to us in the Balkans it sounds familiar - it's the sentence many mothers of the 1990s spoke about sons at war.

The British Foreign Office condemned the trial as „completely unacceptable and unjustified". But the reality is that London has no leverage with Tehran. No ambassadorial relations, no economic lever, no direct line through the US (especially given the current tone of the Trump administration towards Iran).

Perhaps the most disqualifying detail in this story is illuminated by Lindsay Foreman in a previous interview with ITV: during US and Israeli strikes against Iran last year, missiles and drones could be heard inside „Evin" prison. Inmates panicked. „When the buildings shake, there's nowhere for us to run," she said. The prison, she stressed, has no proper emergency exits.

A bigger tragedy than a 10-year sentence for espionage with fabricated evidence is the scenario where their prison gets hit by a missile. And right now, with escalation between Iran and the West, that scenario is still on the table.

For Balkan readers - 10 years without the possibility of normal communication, in a foreign prison, on fabricated charges - that's a story many of our diaspora and insiders remember from the 1990s. It's not by chance that British journalists call it „unimaginable". In the Balkans we read it as „already heard".