Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe has been released from detention in Iran.Credit:Twitter/@TulipSiddiq
Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s local MP Tulip Siddiq, who has fought for her freedom, published a new photograph of her constituent onboard her flight home.
“I can’t believe I can finally share this photo,” she said adding, “Nazanin is now in the air flying way from six years of hell in Iran”.
Iranian State Media reported the British mother had been handed over to a British team at Tehran’s International Imam Khomeini Airport.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s husband Richard Ratcliffe, who led the campaign for her freedom, told the Associated Press he was “looking forward to a new life.”
“You can’t get back the time that’s gone. That’s a fact,” Ratcliffe said at the air base where he awaited his wife’s arrival along with their seven-year-old daughter. “But we live in the future.”
Zaghari-Ratcliffe was arrested in 2016, convicted of plotting the overthrow of Iran’s government and sentenced to five years in prison. She’s always denied the charges. She was employed by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of the news agency, but was on leave visiting family in Iran at the time.
Iranian news agency Fars reported the UK had released £393.8 million ($709 million) of its debts to Iran before the release of the pair. The debt has been a sticking point in British-Iranian relations for more than 40 years.
After the Islamic Revolution in 1979, the UK cancelled an agreement with the country’s late Shah for the supply of more than 1500 Chieftain tanks. Since the shah’s government had paid in advance, the new Iranian government demanded the payment be returned given the tanks were never delivered. The two countries have haggled over the debt ever since.
The breakthrough was reached as world leaders try to negotiate the return of both Iran and the US to an international agreement designed to limit Tehran’s nuclear enrichment program — talks that have been complicated by the prisoner issue.
Four former British foreign secretaries had failed to secure Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s release.
“We have been working very hard to do that over the past few months,” Truss said.
Academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert was jailed as a “spy” in Iran and released in 2020 in a prisoner-swap deal. Credit:Scott McNaughton
Kylie Moore-Gilbert, the Australian woman who was released from Iranian detention in 2020, said the women would be feeling a “tumult of emotions”.
“So happy for Nazanin and Anoosheh,” she said.
“I remember this moment well; such a tumult of emotions – fear of the unknown, apprehension, expectation,” she said.
“Both are endlessly fortunate to have warm and loving families to welcome them home, and navigate a complex adjustment back to a life of freedom.”
with AP
Get a note direct from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for the weekly What in the World newsletter here.
British woman released from Iranian detention after ‘tenacious’ diplomacy
Source: Philippines Alive
