It’s the end of a politico-diplomatic nightmare for the Iranian-British Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Anoosheh Ashoori, detained in Iran for several years. London confirmed their release on Wednesday March 16 at midday: they will be “back in the UK today”, Foreign Minister Liz Truss said on Twitter, adding that a third Iranian-British hostage, Morad Tahbaz, “obtained bail”. On Thursday morning, the first two landed at the Royal Air Force’s Brize Norton airbase in southern England.
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, 43, was arrested in Tehran in 2016 as she was about to leave the Iranian capital for London, after spending the Iranian New Year holiday with her parents. She had been sentenced to five years in prison for espionage, a judgment without foundation for her family and the British authorities. Released in early 2020, the employee of the Thomson Reuters Foundation had been placed under house arrest with her parents in Tehran.
Ten years in prison for espionage
Anoosheh Ashoori, a retired civil engineer, was arrested in 2017 and sentenced to ten years in prison for spying for the Mossad, a sentence he was serving in the notorious Evin prison. Like that of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, his family has consistently denied this accusation. Morad Tahbaz, who also has American nationality, was sentenced to ten years in prison for “collaboration with an enemy country or the United States. He had been imprisoned since the winter of 2018.
If the family of Anoosheh Ashoori remained discreet during most of the negotiations between London and Tehran (following the recommendations of the Foreign Office), that of Nazanin chose media coverage. Her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, fought steadfastly and courageously, speaking out and going on hunger strikes to push successive British governments into action. “We are immensely relieved. We will be able to start a normal family life,” declared Wednesday, in front of his London home, this accountant by profession, holding by the shoulders his daughter Gabriella, 7, separated from her mother for five years.
Met in mid-November on the twentieth day of his second hunger strike, Mr. Ratcliffe explained that the release of his wife and the other Iranian-British hostages was conditional on the reimbursement by London of a debt owed to Iran for almost fifty years. This debt is “the reason why Nazanin was arrested, the reason why she is still detained”, he assured. In the 1970s, the Shah of Iran’s regime paid for a delivery of 1,500 British tanks, suspended during the 1979 Islamic revolution. British authorities have long disputed this debt, but in 2009 their appeal was definitively rejected by an international arbitral tribunal.
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