The husband of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the British-Iranian charity worker detained in Iran, has said she is “very, very angry” after learning about the collapse of a deal to bring her home.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe fears she is a “bargaining chip” in ongoing nuclear talks and is filled with “anger at her life being stolen” and the government’s “lack of urgency” in securing her release, Richard Ratcliffe said.
The 43-year-old, from West Hampstead in London, was jailed for five years in 2016 after being convicted on national security charges for plotting to topple the Iranian government, which she has always denied.
She was released temporarily in 2020 during the Covid pandemic, but was handed a further sentence in 2021 for “spreading propaganda” and is held under house arrest in Tehran, unable to return to the UK to join her husband and seven-year-old daughter, Gabriella.
On Wednesday, MPs were told the UK had signed an agreement to secure her release in the summer, but that the deal had fallen through. Officials had previously refused to confirm that any agreement had been made, but when questioned about it by the couple’s MP, Tulip Siddiq, the prime minister did not deny it.
Britain is understood to have agreed to repay a £400m debt it owes Iran relating to an abortive deal to export British armaments in the 1970s. The UK government has not revealed why the agreement about Zaghari-Ratcliffe broke down, but there are fears it is linked to negotiations with Iran over nuclear weapons.
Iran is engaged in talks in Vienna with diplomats from the US, France, Germany, Russia, China and the UK, who hope to persuade it to limit its sensitive nuclear activities in return for the lifting of economic sanctions.
In response to Siddiq’s question, Boris Johnson said the debt was “difficult to settle and square away for all sorts of reasons to do with sanctions”.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe was able to watch the debate from Tehran, where she is under house arrest at her mother’s property. “In some ways she’s all isolated and far removed from the world, but she can see it now in a way that when she was in prison she couldn’t,” Ratcliffe said.
While the confirmation that a deal was nearly struck in the summer had left him feeling hopeful, “for Nazanin, it really all rushed back that actually this has been dragged on for ages and she’s lost six years of her life”.
He said his wife was “amazed” by the prime minister’s comments. She told him: “I could have been home last year. Why am I still here? They have ruined my life, day by day, for six years. Where is [Johnson’s] urgency? I just want to come home.”
The next day she was “even crosser” after “stewing on the injustice”. “She’s calmer now,” he said yesterday, adding that they had spent the morning going through Gabriella’s baby photos together.
Johnson has publicly pledged to meet Ratcliffe, an accountant who has campaigned tirelessly for his wife’s release, although a date for the meeting has yet to be fixed. Ratcliffe is expected to meet officials from the Foreign Office in the coming days.
Siddiq, Labour MP for Hampstead and Kilburn, has urged transparency about the reasons for the collapse of the deal. “My constituent, Richard, starved himself almost to death during a hunger strike. He didn’t eat for three weeks. I think they have a duty to explain themselves,” she said.
Ratcliffe said: “Why did it go wrong? What’s stopping it from being solved now? I worry we’ve become a bargaining chip in the nuclear negotiations and that the debt is now leverage on the UK side.”
He added: “We’re essentially being held in a waiting room. It’s a game of cat and mouse being played.”
A Foreign Office spokesman said: “We remain committed to securing the release of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, Anoosheh Ashoori and Morad Tahbaz. It is unhelpful to connect wider bilateral issues with those unfairly detained in Iran.
“Separately, the UK has always said we are committed to paying this debt to Iran. We continue to explore options as a matter of urgency to resolve this case, and will not comment further as discussions are ongoing.”
