Richard Ratcliffe and his daughter Gabriella hold signs in Parliament Square, London
(Picture: PA Wire)A £400million debt to Iran linked to the imprisonment of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe should be settled, a cabinet minister has said, after it emerged a deal to secure the London woman’s release had collapsed.
It was revealed this week that an agreement to make the payment and secure Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe freedom was finalised last summer, but later “fell through”.
On Thursday, Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said international sanctions on Iran made it challenging to make the payment.
He told Times Radio that Britain should “stand by its obligations”, adding: “But we also have international law obligations around sanctions and that makes how we hand back that money very difficult while Iran is in breach of all sorts of obligations, and indeed engaged in malign activity around the Middle East.
“So we are trying to navigate a route through, we’re trying to navigate that.”
Dual citizen Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe, from Hampstead, was arrested on charges of plotting against the regime while visiting her family in Tehran in 2016.
The charity worker was jailed for five years and then sentenced to another year’s confinement last April after being accused of “spreading propaganda”.
Iranian authorities have suggested she will be released, along with other dual nationals Anoosheh Ashoori and Morad Tahbaz, when the UK pays the £400million it owes for a defence equipment deal dating back to the 1970s.
The government had previously denied the historical debt’s link to the case and refused to confirm that any settlement was ever reached.
Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s husband Richard Ratcliffe went on hunger strike and camped outside the Foreign Office in Whitehall for 21 days last year in a bid to draw more attention to his wife’s case.
The couple’s MP Tulip Siddiq on Wednesday urged the prime minister to personally intervene and revive the deal after revealing it “fell through” last summer in Parliament.
Boris Johnson admitted it was “difficult to settle for reasons to do with sanctions” but said: “We will continue to work on it.”
Mr Wallace added: “No one has abandoned the efforts, it’s just absolutely not as straightforward as people would think, there’s a sense of urgency, we’re trying to resolve this but it’s difficult in the face of an Iran which is effectively taking hostages.”
