Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe has been released by Iran and is flying back to the UK.
The British-Iranian had been arrested in April 2016 and spent nearly six years in detention for allegedly plotting against the Iranian government.
The Foreign Secretary has confirmed that Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe will fly to the UK via Oman.
Hopes for his release were raised yesterday after news that his British passport had been returned to him.
Retired British-Iranian civil engineer Anoosheh Ashoori, another dual national held by Iran, was also released and is on the same flight.
Another dual citizen, Morad Tahbaz, has been released from prison on leave, but remains in Iran.
Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe, 43, has dual British and Iranian citizenship and prior to her arrest lived in London with her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, who is an accountant.
She worked as a project manager for the Thomson Reuters Foundation charity and was previously employed by BBC Media Action, an international development charity.
Iranian authorities alleged that Ms. Zaghari-Ratcliffe was plotting to overthrow the Tehran government, but no official charges were made public.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said she was running a “foreign-linked hostile network” when she visited.
She says she had been taking her daughter Gabriella, now six, to celebrate the Iranian New Year and visit her parents.
Both the Thomson Reuters Foundation and BBC Media Action issued statements saying that she was not working in Iran but was vacationing there.
In April 2021, after spending the last year of her term on probation at her parents’ home in Tehran, Ms. Zaghari-Ratcliffe was sentenced to an additional year in prison and a one-year travel ban, after be found guilty of propaganda against the Iranian government.
Ms. Zaghari-Ratcliffe subsequently lost an appeal against her second conviction.
Foreign Secretary Liz Truss denounced the decision as “a terrible continuation of the cruel ordeal” the mother was going through.
Successive Foreign Secretaries led unsuccessful efforts to secure Ms. Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s release.
Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s husband says he was told she was being held to force the UK to resolve a multi-million dollar dispute dating back to the 1970s.
Iran claimed that the UK owed £400m in debt related to a canceled order for 1,500 Chieftain tanks.
Announcing Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s release, Ms Truss said the debt had been settled “in parallel” and “in full compliance with UK and international sanctions and all legal obligations”.
She said negotiations had been taking place over the past few months with Iran and with the help of the Gulf state of Oman.
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- April-June 2016: subjected to “intense interrogation” during the first two months of her incarceration, and held in solitary confinement
- September 2016: sentenced to five years in prison by Tehran Revolutionary Court
- April 2017: loses a final appeal in Iran’s supreme court to overturn his sentence
- August 2018: reunited with her daughter during a three-day temporary release
- January 2019: begins a three-day hunger strike to protest the lack of specialized medical care
- June 2019: goes on a 15-day hunger strike, calling for his unconditional release
- March 2020: received a temporary prison license due to the pandemic, since which he has been living at his parents’ house in Tehran
- September 2020: He said he will face another trial on a new charge
- April 2021: sentenced to another year in prison
- October 2021: loses an appeal against a second prison sentence in Iran
- March 2022: Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is released and returns to the UK
Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe has spoken publicly primarily through her husband.
According to Ratcliffe, she missed her daughter “all the time” and was in “pretty fragile” mental health.
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In an open letter published in October 2019, Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe said that her daughter’s weekly visits had sustained her throughout her imprisonment.
Writing before Gabriella returned to the UK to start school, she said the thought of not being able to hold her son was “the deepest torture of all”.
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