Project Manager for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, she was arrested in 2016 in Tehran, accused of conspiracy to overthrow the Islamic Republic of Iran and sentenced to five years in prison.
Le Monde with AFP
The Iranhip Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, withholding since 2016 in Iran, where she had been sentenced for sedition, what she has always denied, is on the way back for the United Kingdom, announced on Wednesday March 16 A British member. “Nazanin is at Tehran Airport and on the way to home home,” said Twitter Tulip Siddiq, a Labor member of the district of Hampstead and Kilburn (North London), where Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe lives, Richard Ratcliffe.
In Tehran, an Iranian official media confirmed that the Irano-British had been “discount” to the British government. The latter did not immediately confirmed his release, but the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, was earlier in the day expressed the hope of a positive outcome, saying that “the negotiations continued” and were in their last phase.
Accused of plot
43 years old, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe had recovered his passport Tuesday, raising the hope of a close release. Project Check for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, philanthropic branch of the press agency of the same name, she had been arrested in 2016 in Tehran, where she came to visit her family. She had been accused of conspiracy to overthrow the Islamic Republic of Iran, which she denied fiercely, and sentenced to five years in prison.
After serving his sentence, she was again sentenced to the end of April 2021 to one year in prison for participating in a rally in front of the Iran Embassy in London in 2009. In October 2021, she Lost his appeal, having feared his relatives an imminent return to prison, from which she had been authorized to go out with an electronic bracelet in March 2020, because of the pandemic of Covid-19.
Richard Ratcliffe, her husband and father of their little girl, Gabriella, had gotten a hunger strike for 21 days in the fall of 2021 to alert on his fate.
Negotiate the release of several binational
Boris Johnson confirmed that a team of British negotiators worked in Tehran to obtain the release of several binationals. According to the British media, including The Guardian , Anoosheh Ashoori, a retirement engineer arrested in August 2017 as he visited his mother and sentenced Ten years in prison for espionage in favor of Israel, would also have been released.
Wednesday morning, the British Foreign Minister Liz Truss, told the BBC that it had given priority “to ensure that we refund the debt that we need legitimately to the Iranian authorities”, a debt of 400 million pounds (475 million ‘Euros) dating from the time of the chah of Iran. The British authorities, however, have always taken care not to bind the two cases.