Academic jailed in Iran reveals regime tried to lure her Israeli husband

British-Australian academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert says Iran tried “to use me as a hostage in a diabolical plot to lure my husband.”

By World Israel News Staff

A British-Australian academic who was freed after more than two years in an Iranian jail said she was used as bait to try and lure her Israeli husband to Iran, the Daily Mail reported Sunday.

Dr. Kylie Moore-Gilbert, an Islamic Studies scholar, was arrested in 2018 and held in solitary confinement in prison until being freed last November in a prisoner exchange for Iranians jailed in Thailand on terrorism charges for attacks against Israeli targets in Bangkok.

Moore-Gilbert revealed that she was subjected to psychological torture while in prison as the Iranian jailers attempted to force her to help lure her husband, Ruslan Hodorov, to Iran.

Moore-Gilbert met her husband over 10 years ago when she was traveling in the Middle East, where she had become entranced by the cultures and languages. Hodorov had moved to Israel from Russia with his family and he followed her back to Australia, where she gained an advanced degree in Islamic Studies, the report said.

The couple married a few months before she left their Melbourne home on her study trip to Iran, where she was arrested on charges of spying and held in a small jail cell in freezing temperatures at the nefarious Evin Prison. The spying charges were apparently laid because of her relationship with an Israeli citizen, whom the Iranians also said was a spy.

Moore-Gilbert managed to smuggle a letter out of prison that made its way to Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison in which she detailed how the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) tried to set a trap for her husband.

She said she repeatedly had to defend him to the Iranians, who said he was an Israeli spy.

“The Revolutionary Guard have imprisoned me in these terrible conditions for over nine months in order to extort me both personally and my government,” Moore-Gilbert wrote Morrison.

“They have also attempted to use me as a hostage in a diabolical plot to lure my husband, an Australian permanent resident (and soon to be new citizen) into joining me in an Iranian prison,” she wrote.

Tragically, after finally being freed in the prisoner swap, Moore-Gilbert returned to Australia to discover Hodorov was having an affair with her university colleague, also an expert in the Middle East. She has since split from him and is seeking a divorce, the Australian Herald Sun newspaper reported on the weekend.