AIRPORT arrival lounges are the settings for many emotional reunions, but few can have matched the one at Oslo’s Gardermoen airport yesterday.
After most of the other passengers on the Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul had emerged and left, Fereshteh Halimi and her daughter, Parmida, 7, finally pushed their trolley into the arrivals hall. Her husband, Mohammed Mostafaei, cried and rushed towards them. For several minutes they hugged and embraced, sobbing and laughing and smiling all at once.
Even onlookers found tears welling in their eyes. “I’m so, so happy,” Mr Mostafaei exclaimed in a voice cracking with emotion.
The joy of this remarkable Iranian family was easy to understand. This was the reunion they had feared would never happen. It was a moment of extreme catharsis after 24 hours of unbearable tension and 40 days of separation, upheaval and trauma.
Mr Mostafaei, 37, is the human rights lawyer who represented Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, the Iranian woman sentenced to death by stoning for alleged adultery. He was forced to flee in July after he severely embarrassed the Tehran regime by broadcasting the woman’s plight to the world. Unable to catch him, the Iranian police seized his wife, with her brother and father, and held them as hostages in Tehran’s infamous Evin prison. His wife was incarcerated for 14 days. She was released only when Mr Mostafaei reached the safety of Norway and was beyond the regime’s reach.
But whether the Iranian government would let Ms Halimi and Parmida leave Tehran to join him was an entirely different matter, especially as she had been released only on bail and was facing trial for helping her husband to escape from the country.
The family put the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the test yesterday. Ms Halimi, 33, had a multiple exit visa obtained before her husband attracted the ire of the authorities. Ten days ago she bought air tickets to Istanbul for herself and her daughter, with return tickets to avoid suspicion.
She told only her closest friends and family, and said nothing on the telephone because she knew her calls were monitored. She spoke to her husband only on a new pay-as-you-go mobile the authorities had not traced.
Accompanied by relatives, she and Parmida set off for Imam Khomeini airport just after 1am, almost helpless with fear.
“I thought it was 60 to 70 per cent they would not let us come,” she said.
At each stage of the seemingly interminable checking-in process, relatives telephoned Mr Mostafaei in a hotel room in Oslo to keep him up to date with her progress. If too much time passed without any news he telephoned them, fearing he would alert the authorities by doing so but unable to contain himself.
Finally, his wife called. She was on the plane, she said. But both knew of instances when agents had seized passengers just before planes took off so they were still consumed by fear.
“It was like a nightmare . . . I was asking God to please kill me rather than keep me here,” Ms Halimi said.
Her husband said: “If someone told me they’d been taken off the plane I’d have had a heart attack there and then.”
It was 4am Iranian time, 1.30am in Norway, when Mr Mostafaei received the call he longed for. A relative said: “All your worries are over. They’re on their way and now you can be together. Make sure you wear your best clothes.”
As the plane took off, Ms Halimi said, she wept with relief, gave thanks to God for her deliverance and then, in an almost symbolic gesture, removed her hijab.
Mr Mostafaei arrived at the airport outside Oslo a good two hours before his wife’s flight landed, clutching flowers, beaming all over his face and fielding congratulatory calls from well-wishers on his mobile.
He was convinced the regime did not slip up, but decided to let his wife and daughter leave because the authorities realised they had been condemned in the international media over their treatment of him and Ms Ashtiani.
“Had they stopped my wife and daughter from coming out, they would have paid an even heavier price,” he said.
He joked about the reception he would receive from his wife for fleeing the country while she was still in prison. “Maybe she will make me wash the dishes,” he said. The family then went to a nearby Comfort Inn, where Ms Halimi was able to speak freely for the first time since the ordeal began.
Ms Halimi, who is well educated and speaks some English, told how she spent the first 24 hours in a cell with 30 other women. She was interrogated from 11pm to 2am on the first night. Her questioners demanded to know where her husband was and warned her she might never see her daughter again. The next day she was blindfolded and questioned again.
She spent the last 13 days in solitary confinement in a tiny cell, with the light never turned off. After a week, she learned that her husband was safely out of Iran, and rejoiced.
The reunion was bittersweet.
“I’m happy because I’m with my husband,” Ms Halimi said, “but I have sadness in my heart because I’ve left behind my friends, my family, my country and all the things I love.”
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