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London: The lone woman among 15 British sailors detained by Iranian forces said in an interview published on Monday that she feared she could be raped and then killed.
Faye Turney told The Sun in her first interview since her group’s release on Thursday that she was threatened with years in prison unless she did what she was told.
Turney said “aggressive” armed men in uniform aboard boats mounted with heavy artillery had captured them. One of the men was pointing a rocket propelled grenade launcher at her head.
“If we had opened fire there would have been a bloodbath that we could not have won. My parents would have been picking me up from RAF Brize Norton in a wooden box,” she said.
“I was angry and confused…There was nothing different about that operation than the others we had carried out. We knew we had done nothing wrong,” she said.
She said she had tucked her ponytail down the back of her uniform and tried to avoid eye contact with the captors so they would not discover she was a woman.
But one of them noticed. “That same man reached over and started tugging at my helmet, trying to rip it off. There was a look of total disbelief and they kept staring at me and repeating ‘woman, woman’.”
Turney said that during their 13-day detention she was asked how she felt about dying for her country. One morning she heard wood being sawn and nails hammered near her cell and a woman measured her with a tape. "I was convinced they were making my coffin," she said.
The 15 were seized in the Shatt al-Arab waterway between Iraq and Iran. Iran said they entered its waters illegally, a claim Britain denies.
Iranian television showed new film footage on Monday of the sailors and marines playing table tennis and chess and watching a football match on television while they were in Iran.
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