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LONDON — After spending years locked up, British-Iranians Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Anoosheh Ashoori are on their way to a Tehran airport to leave Iran.
The two are expected to fly out of Iran in the coming hours but they remain “under the authority of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard,” Tulip Siddiq, the Labour MP for Hampstead and Kilburn, told Sky News after being in touch with Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s family.
Their release comes after intense talks between the Iranian government and a British negotiating team in Tehran, and will feel like a victory for British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss after just four months in the role and which has been overshadowed by a difficult meeting with her Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov in Moscow.
Siddiq, who worked on the case under three prime ministers and five foreign secretaries, told Times Radio it was Truss who “actually did something.”
“We had such a difficult time with the other foreign secretaries speaking to them trying to convince them about this debt,” she said, adding: “It wasn’t a dispute about whether we owe the money” but “more about them not wanting to link the fact that we owe the money and the release of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, even though Nazanin was actually told by the Revolutionary Guards over and over again, when she was in prison, that the reason she was being held is that because of our failure to pay the debt.”
Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab, who worked on the case in his previous role as foreign secretary, told MPs he could not yet confirm the reports about their release but said “it feels like positive signs.”
Iranian state media said Britain has “settled a long-overdue debt” of around £400 million owed to Tehran since the 1970s, which relates to a canceled order of 1,500 Chieftain tanks. The U.K. had committed to paying the debt but spent years litigating the amount and looking for ways to overcome the sanctions imposed against the Iranian regime.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a project manager with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, was arrested at a Tehran airport in April 2016 during a trip to Iran with her daughter Gabriella and jailed for five years on charges of plotting against the regime. She was later sentenced to an additional year of confinement on charges of spreading propaganda.
Ashoori, a retired civil engineer, was sentenced to 10 years in jail in 2019 on charges of spying for Israel’s Mossad and two years for “acquiring illegitimate wealth,” according to Iran’s judiciary.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe, Ashoori and Thomson Reuters Foundation denied the charges.
Other British nationals remain in prison in Iran, however, including businessman Morad Tahbaz, who is a citizen of the U.S., U.K. and Iran; and the British-Iranian labor rights activist Mehran Raoof.
Amnesty International’s Chief Executive Sacha Deshmukh said the U.K. government needs to now focus on their release.
“It’s been clear for years that the Iranian authorities are targeting foreign nationals with spurious national security-related charges to exert diplomatic pressure, and it’s more important than ever that Britain works multilaterally to combat this insidious practice,” he said.
This article has been updated
Source: Politico
