DUBAI: British-Iranian aid worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and dual national Anousheh Ashouri are on their way to a Tehran airport to leave Iran after years of detention.
“Both of them are on their way to the airport in Tehran to leave Iran,” their lawyer Hojjat Kermani said on Wednesday. British lawmaker Tulip Siddiq, who is the member of parliament where Zaghari-Ratcliffe used to live in London, said on Twitter: “Nazanin is at the airport in Tehran and on her way home.”
Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a project manager with the Thomson Reuters Foundation was arrested at a Tehran airport in April 2016 and later convicted by an Iranian court of plotting to overthrow the clerical establishment. Her family and the foundation deny the charge.
Ashouri was sentenced to 10 years in jail in 2019 for spying for Israel’s Mossad and two years for “acquiring illegitimate wealth”, according to Iran’s judiciary.
The releases came after Tehran and London pressed on with talks about a long-standing 400-million-pound ($520 mln) debt. Iran’s clerical rulers say Britain owes the money that Iran’s Shah paid up front for 1,750 Chieftain tanks and other vehicles, almost none of which were eventually delivered after the Islamic Revolution of 1979 toppled the US-backed leader.
While the British and Iranian governments have said there is no connection between the debt and the case of Zaghari-Ratcliffe, Iranian state media in 2021 reported unidentified Iranian officials saying she would be freed once the debt was paid.
Asked by a reporter whether he saw signs of optimism on Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s case, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said, “I don’t want to tempt fate but clearly the negotiations about all our difficult consular cases have been going on for a long time and really I think it would not be sensible for me to comment until we have got a final result,” he said.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who served most of her first sentence in Tehran’s Evin prison, was released in March 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic and kept under house arrest at her parents’ home in Tehran. In March 2021, she was released from house arrest but she was summoned to court again on the new charge.
In April 2021, she was then sentenced to a new term in jail on charges of propaganda against Iran’s ruling system, charges she denies. However that sentence has not yet started and she was banned from leaving the country.
