Cape Talk, Friday night

Prisoners. I'm standing outside an apartment building in a borough of Paris. It's autumn and cold and rainy. I'm here to meet somebody whose husband disappeared into the Syrian prison system. And I've come because, apparently, her husband had information about Austin Tice.

Hi. How are you? Nice for me. I love your earrings. They're so beautiful. Thank you very much. They're so cool. It's so beautiful. Nura Ghazi is a Syrian lawyer who represented prisoners that were detained by the Syrian regime. In order to understand her connection to Austin, she tells me about her partner, Basil Hatabil El-Safadi, a well-known activist. So I met Basil in April.

In 2011, in demonstration, okay, we fell in love. Both of us were followed by the security. We were hiding. Yes, we got engaged. It was two weeks before our wedding. It was March 2012. We should go to the last trial for my wedding dress. And Basil insisted to go for a meeting. I told him I have bad feelings and I'm waiting.

No Basil. So after midnight, I should realize: okay, Basil is detained. So I was like very calm. I sent messages to all our friends who were still in Damascus to not reply any call or message from Basil because it could be like a trap. Like Syrian intelligence trap. After I finished, I totally collapsed. And

He's then disappeared for nine months. Nine months? Yeah. After months of heartache, Nora tells me she gets a message from a woman who has a relative being held in the same prison as Basil, and that she has a letter from Basil that's been smuggled out. So Nora goes to visit that prison as a lawyer and secretly passes a letter back to Basil through another prisoner. For weeks, this becomes their hidden way to communicate.

It's fragile, indirect, and dangerous. But Nora still has all of those letters. How was Syrian intelligence, the Mahabharata, not? Why were they allowing these letters? They don't know. It was secret? Yeah. Wow. I used to do the visit as a lawyer, so at that time, they don't search lawyers. It's normal to exchange papers between prisoners and lawyers. How did it?