you are watching newsday on the bbc. i'm sharanjit leyl in singapore. the headlines. he was taken into custody american prosecutors announce charges against wikileaks founder, when ecuador withdrew the protection julian assange following his arrest of its embassy in london in london his lawyer says he now after nearly seven years. british prime minister theresa may faces extradition to the us. this sets a dangerous precedent for all media organisations and journalists in europe defended the arrest telling and elsewhere around the world. huge crowds take to the streets parliament no—one is above the law. of sudan's capital huge crowds have taken after the military seizes power. to the streets of sudan's capital after the military seized power. following months of protest, the country's longstanding i'm ben bland in london. president omar al bashir has been also in the programme... removed from power. and this story is the first private moon mission ends in failure, trending on bbc.com. it's thought to have crashed the world's first private moon mission has ended in failure. on the lunar surface. a remote controlled israeli making his mark around the world. spacecraft is believed to have we'll be speaking to architect crashed on the lunar surface moshe safdie to find out what inspires his unique designs. as it was due to land. that's all. stay with bbc world news. now on bbc news, hardtalk.

hello and welcome to hardtalk. i'm shaun ley. the united states says iran's revolutionary guard corps ‘promotes terrorism as a tool of state craft‘. it's the first time the us has labelled another nation's military as a terrorist organisation. jason rezaian, who used to report from tehran, might agree. certainly he knows what it's like to be terrorised by the state. seized from his home without warning, this us—iranian journalist was interrogated, tried and convicted on vague charges. he was held for 544 days before a deal was done to release him in 2016. he is now banned from iran for life. but is the trump administration right to see maximum pressure as the only way to affect change in iran?

jason rezaian, welcome to hardtalk. you lived in iran forfive years at the time of your arrest. how unexpected was it? thanks for having me on today. it was quite unexpected. i had been living and working there for five years with full state permission. there had been moments where i thought my safety was potentially compromised but i thought that we were past that era. so initial suspicions on their part? certainly. during the years i worked there, there was periods of tumult within the society. at certain points, ourjournalist credentials had been taken away across the board, myself and other colleagues as well. i always accepted that this might happen to me but i never

expected it actually would. paint a picture for us. give us an idea of what that experience was like. you were heading out of your apartment on the way to a party? my wife and i were dressed up for a surprise birthday party for my mother—in—law. we were three days away from heading home to the united states for a few months of what i like to think was well deserved rest. as we were leaving the apartment, we went down in the elevator into the garage where taxis would pick us up and there was a man standing there with a gun as the door opened. aimed at your head? aimed at my head. said my name, worked his way into the elevator with two other security guards with him, forced their way up into our apartment and that is when our ordeal began. i think you can't know what is about to unfold in front of you in such a chaotic scene.

i thought to myself that this was a mistake, that it would not last, that it would be resolved quickly. but the visceral fear did not really penetrate my mind for a few days. and on that point, the property was ransacked and you were taken away. it is a surreal image you paint in your book, prisoner, about your time in captivity of you and your wife surrounded by armed men wearing medical masks, a woman in a full body cover, a chador, and everybody else going about their normal evening business. as if nothing was happening. it was incredibly strange. i had not seen a scene like that in iran before but obviously the people in our neighbourhood had been conditioned. they had seen this, having lived their entire life in an authoritarian state. they were used to such scenes

and they knew to not get involved. i think for me that was one more reminder that the sentimental picture that some of us have built up in our own mind about a place can disappear in an instant. i'm interested in that. let's just pick that apart if we may. you were a foreign journalist and an american at that working for what, according to the iranian government at least, is a propaganda organ of the great satan. isn't it inevitable that at some point you would have a proper run—in with the authorities. to them atleast you really were a representative of a hostile power. that is one way of looking at it. on the other hand, they need representatives of those hostile forces to report from their country. the last thing the iranian authority wants is a full media blackout in the west. and at that particular moment when negotiations were reaching a climax,

they needed it more than ever and the doors were open to more foreign reporters than there had been at any point in the first 35 years of the regime. in an interview earlier this year, you described it, 2008 to early 2009 as a moment of incredible hope, that 0bama yes we can period. "i felt like i had a green light and if i did not hit the gas and hightail it to iran then it would never happen again. this was a moment that would pass." there had been multiple moments like that. when i first moved there in 2009, it was one such moment. and then the re—election, the still contested re—election of mahmoud ahmadinejad that happened injune 2009 and that hope was deflated quickly. which is why i wonder really if it should have been such a surprise to you? whether you were.. however positively you were, engaged in an act of self—deception. i don't think so. i spent so much time reading the signs, going back and forth and following the rules

to the letter of the law. when i was told i could not work in the country, i did not work in the country. at the point of my arrest, five years into my relationship living in the place, it was literally on the day that my press credentials had been extended for a year that my wife and i were hauled into prison. that goes to show that there are competing centres of powers and one of them did not like what i was doing. i'm sure we'll talk about that later, these competing loci of power in this complicated state to understand. but you did say in your book that you were part of the growing trend ofjournalists with deep foreign roots, doing a reverse migration, half knowingly putting yourselves in very precarious and at the same time, essential positions. it happens in iran, it happens in egypt, turkey, parts of africa, pakistan there are a long list of countries where this is the case. the reality is we have to make a decision on whether or not we need

coverage from these places. i follow the camp that believes we do. what did they accuse you of? they accused me of first being the head of the cia station in tehran which was as ridiculous a claim to me as it sounds right now. sort of flattering. in a way that i don't physically think i fit the bill based on the film representations of top spies. but over time it became that i was trying to engineer the soft overthrow of the islamic republic through creating more friendly ties between the us and iran. i don't think that's an actual law i was accused of breaking... but they were very vague about what you were accused up, even up to the point of your conviction. of course. that conviction was still never given to me in the form of a sentence or anything. i was just told i was convicted.

so there was no day in court, as it were? there were multiple days in court. and on on the last one the judge, judge salavati, who was known as the judge of death, the hanging judge for signing over 600 death warrants during his tenure said to me that you will be back in one week for resentencing. it has been five years and i have not seen him. still waiting to hearfrom him. let's pick up then on the allegation that the head, the station chief in tehran. have you ever been approached by the cia? never. not once. in my normal day—to—day work as a journalist i've met diplomats and officials from a variety of countries as we all do, but i was never approached to work for the government.. it's not entirely surprising that they did not take it at face value, is it? you have to go back and look at the words of the iranian minister of intelligence at the time, very long into my imprisonment, about 13 months in.

he was asked on iranian state television programme what he thought of the case against me. it was a competing intelligence service that arrested me so he said he should not be asked that. i think that the us no longer sends journalists to do intelligence gathering. they have much better ways than sending people into the country and putting them in harm's way. i think you can make any case out of the circumstances, or the fact that i was in the country. from a sceptical, even perhaps paranoid state to say "he's an american with only historic connections to this country, he lives in a very nice flat, he doesn't attend press conferences anymore, instead he fills his flat. as you said, it became a sort of landing zone for americans in iran. notjust americans. anybody passing through. but, look... compared to the behaviour

of a conventionaljournalist they might think... i would argue that it's the behaviour of conventional journalists everywhere. you were held in solitary confinement in a room where the light was never turned off, and threatened with the removal of your limbs. you were very well aware of the number of prisoners who were being executed not far from yourself. were you ever tortured? it's an interesting question and a difficult one to answer. i make the case that i was tortured relentlessly psychologically from day one. give us an example. what would they say to you? you had an interesting relationship with your interregator that developed over time. it is a classic good cop, bad cop. and when you are thrust into a tightly sealed vacuum it is hard to make sense of what is going on. firstly they cut you off from reality, from the outside world. they make you malleable in the process. and spending 20 or more hours a day in solitary confinement,

you have a deep need for human connection with whoever is put in front of you. did they use your wife against you, very much? they used the lack of my wife's presence against me. i had no idea of her whereabouts. you heard from her when you were blindfolded on your first night of interrogation. "i had already been changed into prison clothes, why are you not in prison clothes?" it was a scary thing to not know where she was. as it turned out she was probably only a couple hundred metres away. but she was also going through a similar set of interrogations and threats. she was there for ten weeks but you were there for much longer. correct. and what is striking about the book is the moments of perhaps unintended humour in how you were treated. at one point your interrogator rings your mother and decides that that wasn't a good idea. tell us about that. apparently in the scheme

of negotiations, secretary of statejohn kerry was making a constant effort to bring myself and other americans detained in iran home. and he told the iranian foreign minister that he needed to do something, to create some sort of hope for this family that there will be a reunion. so i was wrestled from my cell on thanksgiving in november 2014. i was told that i could call my mother. and i said "why...? is this my last rites? is this the end?" they said no, it is your mother's... it is an american holiday today and we've been told that you have to congratulate your mother on this auspicious occasion. so they dialled her up and handed me the phone and i talked to my mum and my mum was very adamant, "put me on the damn phone. "i want to talk some

sense into these guys." my mum is tough. and they were unused to that. and then at one point when you were taken into custody you were asked whether the handcuffs were too tight. yes. this was one of those moments of almost comic, incredibly hard to believe that they would ask me. did you think they were too tight? i thought if i said they were too tight they would tighten them further. i've seen a lot of films. so have you. it was strange. they were constantly trying to paint themselves as less evil than a — they are made out to be in the international consciousness and b — than western powers. in your view then, to kind of echo donald trump's view on monday, this is a country that has elevated terrorism to statecraft. it uses the tools that one would associate, not the least including hostage taking. i would say that...

i'll say it clearly. i don't think that the designation of a branch sovereign state's military is a good idea. within that branch of the military there are units that are practising terrorism as statecraft, without a doubt. whether it is the quds force in syria, in yemen and iraq or the rgi's intelligence wing which is essentially a hostagetaking organisation. that is what they do. but that doesn't, in your view, necessarily delegitimise the whole state. look, i'm not here to say if the state of the islamic republic is legitimate or not. the united nations has said that and the dealings of dozens of countries with tehran fortifies that. for better orfor worse. and 40 years has been a very long time. it has been a long time. i, like many others, would like to see a secular democratic future for that country. i just don't think that strangling them into submission is the way that

we're going to get there. how big a problem is that this is a country with so many loci of power, the elected president, supreme leader, parliament, the revolutionary guard, the courts, it is a hydra headed state. of course. and i think that there is a case to be made that that is an opportunity for the outside world that we can exploit. pitting one group against the other. but i think that the bigger problem is that not having a real window into that society and it's, by iran's own fault in many ways, it makes it harder to know who we can talk to, if we can talk to, and what, ultimately, they're after. having ditched the nuclear deal, negotiated in part by the president's predecessor barack 0bama, the man who gave that opening for you as you've seen it, improved relations and gave you the sense that this is the right time as an american to go to iran, do you think president trump is right that really maximum

pressure is the only option left, that screwing down the economy and through these kinds of designations, the only way you're going to reshape iran? i don't think that that's true. why not? well, we ratcheted up the sanctions for many years to to the point where we renegotiated it. whether or not people... you could argue that that was effective. it was effective at that point. everybody signed on the dotted line went about their business. then, all of a sudden, america says we're going to take the ball and go home, we don't like it, right. if the united states of america can't stand an international agreement that it signs, what good is our word? so i wonder, will the british government or the european union, will china and russia get on board if we are to try and negotiate a new deal with iran? it doesn't seem like it to me. there is quite a good argument, though, isn't there, for saying that while the nuclear deal may have dealt with one part, one element of iran's threats,

in inverted commas, to the rest of the region and beyond, they had ignored quite big issues, like the one of using proxy groups, for example, to intervene in other countries, whether it be syria or wherever else. the international community had decided that this is the issue that they needed to deal with first. they went in fully aware that they were negotiating a deal over a contested nuclear programme. and i think, in my conversations with people who were involved in those negotiations, on the american side, on the british side, and on the eu side, each have said that we didn't see this as a solution to all of our problems, we saw it as an opening, that if we are able to properly... so we were at first base in terms of building this relationship. exactly. and this is the biggest issue. i mean, stopping a hostile government from getting a nuclear weapon. what's bigger than that? that having been said, mike pompeo, on monday, after the announcement from president trump, tweeted, "there can be no peace and security

in the middle east without weakening iran's revolutionary guard core". that's the secretary of state's opinion. i think that weakening the guard core would be an ideal outcome. i think, though, that they're emboldened by this move. you were one of these people who was in this strange kind of netherworld of being a dual citizen and the iranian government takes a very specific view of dual citizens. it ignores your other citizenship and says, no, you're iranian. until it is time to trade you as an american... but you were, i mean, your father had left iran 50 years ago, 50 years back. 50 years before you went. so your connection is historic for your family, yet you were treated as if you were answerable to the iranian state. you're not the only one. 0ne thinks, obviously, of the british iranian woman, nazanin zaghari—ratcliffe, who is now at the start of her fourth year in detention. it's shocking to me,

the day in april of 2016, just a couple of months after my release, that i heard about her detention, i was immediately concerned, but assumed that her situation would end more quickly. she's got a young child. it's obvious that she is not doing any activity that is against the state of iran. her work didn't even have anything to do with iran. but, unfortunately, i don't think enough is being done here to get her out. i will say that the foreign secretary, jeremy hunt, seems to be doing and saying all the right things on this particular case, unlike his predecessor. ah, yes, we will pass on that one for another programme. butjust on that question, i mean, you were released as a result of a deal, or as you've said yourself, you don't really know quite what form those negotiations took, but you believe that was the case. because, of course, there was a prisoner swap and some us—iranians who were facing sanctions busting charges in the states, you saw them,

some others were flown home. although you are now banned for life. is a deal the only way that you think she is going to get out? yeah. i don't think you can ever expect the iranian regime, especially when it takes a foreign national and especially when the foreign national is a dual national, you can't expect them to do the right thing. there's no precedent of them doing the right thing on one of these cases. so as abhorrent as hostage taking is, especially when it's a state doing this, if our citizens, rights, safety, and ultimately freedom matter, our western governments, our responsible government have to get involved and win their releases. and sojeremy hunt has to do it, he has to find a way to cut a deal. we understand what the american government is doing, the british government on this case has to say, no, we're doing it, we have to go alone on this. it's too important. that's — that's what i believe.

0k. a few months afterjamal khashoggi, who wrote for your paper, who you had met... yep. ..and started to chat to, was killed and dismembered inside the saudi consulate, you told the atlantic magazine, it's just a more treacherous situation now for people like you, dual nationals, but also for journalists. we're living in a moment where the stakes for journalists are incredibly high. the support structures by governments of free societies are just not doing theirjobs, they're deficient. and that's scary. yeah. i mean, that's — that's the reality of the situation. in a moment when there's more violent, reprehensible, aggressive action taken towards members of the press around the world than at any point in modern history, you would hope that the president of the united states, the leader of the free world, would be the voice of reason on this and also the strongest supporter of our first amendment, our right to expression. that's not happening.

instead, he has been greenlighting the worst possible behaviour, whether it's in saudi arabia, the philippines, turkey, many other places. i should make clear, jamal khashoggi was not a dual iranian national, he was a dual saudi arabian citizen. on your experience then, you've been out for some time, but how have you been affected long—term by that long period as a guest of the iranian government? the lingering effects, i wonder if they'll ever go away. i'm very anxious when i travel to new places. i have to plan much more in advance. i'm not immune from nightmares of my experience. it's difficult. and i don't think that i can undo those things. but i will say that over time the little voice inside my head has become more recognisable to me. and that's comforting. and your wife? she's dealing with it. i mean, she's living in a new society. she never lived in the united states before. because she's iranian.

she's iranian. she lived her whole life in tehran. and we're doing the best we can. i mean, we've built a good life for ourselves in the united states but it's not the life we would have chosen for ourselves if we had all choice in the matter. you've changed. how long do you think before iran changes? iran has been changing for many years. it continues to change. what i would like to see happen is that the iranian people are able to reach their goal, which i think is a freer, more representative form of government. i would like also to see the western powers, especially the united states, don't get in the way of that progress. and i think that some of our moves in washington are hamstringing the efforts towards a freer society and getting in the way of iranian civil society in their search for more freedoms. jason rezaian, author of my 544 days in an iranian prison, thank you very much forjoining us for hardtalk. it's a pleasure.

thank you. hello. the calendar is taking us forward into mid—april but the weather seems to want to go backwards. more of a hint of winter, rather than spring in the weekend to come as we will see. for the day ahead, plenty of dry weather, there will be a bit more cloud in the sky then we have had recently, we are going to see some sunny spells. it is high pressure in control, blocking atlantic weather systems, keeping things settled, the flow of air is rather cool coming around that area of high pressure on an increasingly chilly and stronger wind this weekend. there will be a bit of frost around as friday starts, plenty of sunshine for early risers.

the chance of catching one or two showers towards the eastern parts of scotland, and for the cloud building into east anglia in the south—east, it could be the odd shower around here during the morning and afternoon before drier air returns to eastern counties of england to give some sunshine to end the day. elsewhere, we start with sunshine, we could see some cloud building but it will stay mainly dry. this easterly breeze is a bit stronger than it has been on recent days, keeping temperatures in the east around seven to ten degrees. ten to 12 in the west, may be 14 degrees again in north—west scotland. that is what we have had here for the past few days. the wind direction is favourable for a bit of warmth, and a bit of shelter here. let's take a look at the picture through the night and into saturday morning. some areas of cloud around, maybe still the odd shower feeding down towards the far south—east, on the whole, a lot of clear weather and yet again, gardeners and growers need to be aware, there will be a frost for many of us as the weekend begins. i love this view.

high pressure, low pressure, at loggerheads for control of the weekend weather. high pressure though maintaining its control, winning the battle, and it stays with us through the weekend. but with a stronger wind coming in from the east, that will be more noticeable. there will be some sunshine around, some cloud building as saturday begins, while most places will stay dry, still again for east anglia and south—east england, maybe the odd passing shower, could include a bit of hail and maybe some sleet for the higher ground. and it will feel a bit colder. the wind in the west is picking up over the weekend, noticeably so, maybe some gusts around northern ireland to 40mph or so. more cloud on sunday, maybe a bit of rain in the far west, into the isles of scilly, as well. cloud building after a sunday start elsewhere but still sunny spells, still most places staying dry and still coldest in the east, nowhere is particularly warm for the time of the year. temperatures are well below average now. so this is what we are expecting this weekend. dry, occasionalsunshine, a stronger wind, it will feel colder, frosty nights, it is next week temperatures are on the up again.