It’s a story of love and resilience, a sad story with a happy ending, which momentarily distracted Britons from the war in Ukraine and inflation. On March 17, after six years of cruel separation, the Iranian-British Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, 43, was finally able to hug her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, and their daughter, Gabriella, 7, who had been withdrawn at Tehran International Airport on April 3, 2016, when arrested by the Revolutionary Guards. Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was preparing to return to London after spending a few days with her parents.
Britain’s most notorious hostage has endured a long ordeal after being wrongfully convicted of spying by the Tehran regime. She spent four years in the grim prison of Evin, alternating between hunger strikes, suicidal thoughts and false hopes of release. She was sentenced again in 2021 and kept under house arrest at her parents’ house in Tehran. Anoosheh Ashoori, a 68-year-old Iranian-British businessman, was jailed in 2017 on the same charges and released with her.
The British recognized the soft face, brown hair and bright smile of the former employee of the charity Thomson Reuters Foundation when she descended from the plane at a military base in west London. They got to know her thanks to the pictures of her life before, often published in the media in recent years. If Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe has become a celebrity, and if she has finally been able to find her family, it is thanks to her husband, who has struggled so that the Foreign Office does not forget her.
The Shah’s Tanks
An accountant by profession, this simple and courageous man aroused a wave of sympathy in the national media. Refusing the fatality of a destiny shattered by diplomatic issues, he “set the bar very high for all other husbands”, Nicely noted Labor MP Tulip Siddiq, elected from the Ratcliffe constituency (in West Hampstead, an affluent suburb of north-west London), who tirelessly pleaded for Nazanin’s return to Parliament in Westminster.
When Richard Ratcliffe understands that his wife has been taken hostage, he refuses to be silent, contrary to instructions from the Foreign Office. Indefatigable, he connects the demonstrations, the interviews. He led two hunger strikes, in 2019, in front of the Iranian embassy in London, then in November 2021, in front of the Foreign Office: journalists and political figures – especially Labor – marched there to show their support. His fight is also that of his whole family. His mother, his sister, Rebecca Ratcliffe-Jones, his brother-in-law Lim Jones, unite behind him. Her mother greeted journalists during her second hunger strike when her brother-in-law, a doctor, watched over her health.
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