UK mum may face stiffer Iran penalty
IRAN: Iran has levelled new accusations against Nazanin Zaghari-ratcliffe, the British-iranian woman it has jailed for trying to overthrow the regime.
State television claimed Tehran has evidence she was training Iranian journalists in 2010.
The allegation is important because Boris Johnson, the UK foreign secretary, inadvertently suggested that she had been arrested for training journalists for her employer, the Thomson Reuters Foundation. After pressure from her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, and the organisation, Johnson accepted he had misspoken and apologised.
Zaghari-ratcliffe, 38, and her family insist she was on holiday visiting her parents with the couple’s young daughter when she was arrested in March last year. Six months later she was jailed for five years.
The new evidence came in the form of a 2010 payslip confirming that before joining Thomson Reuters, a charitable foundation established by the international media company, she had worked for the BBC World Service Trust. The report also referred to an email, apparently taken from her laptop, which describes the trust’s work as including training ‘‘young aspiring journalists from Iran and Afghanistan through a secure online platform’’. It was known she had worked for the trust and the dates given were six years before her trip to Iran.
Zaghari-ratcliffe already faces new charges of spreading propaganda against the regime, which could add to her sentence.
Johnson’s slip, before a House of Commons committee, was picked up quickly by Iranian media. They have continued to imply it was an admission of guilt by the British government, even after he issued a clarification in Farsi and spoke to his Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif.
The UK government is now considering repaying Iran £400 million (NZ$777M) which Tehran claims it is owed as a refund for an unfulfilled tank order cancelled at the time of the Iranian revolution in 1979.
Ratcliffe told reporters that the new claims could be an attempt by the Iranian authorities to put pressure on Britain to speed up agreement over the payment. ‘‘It’s trying to justify the new charges,’’ he said.
London and Tehran have denied that the proposed payment is a ransom. However, a similar row between the United States and Iran over the jailing of Jason Rezaian, an Iranian-american journalist working for The Washington Post, was resolved last year when a similar frozen payment of US$400 million (NZ$582M) dating back to 1979 was released by Washington.
Iranian television also broadcast court footage yesterday showing Xiyue Wang, a Chinese-american historian, who was arrested while studying archival records in Iran connected with his studies.
The new claims came a day after Zaghari-ratcliffe addressed a rally in London via a mobile phone and loudspeaker on Saturday. The imprisoned mother thanked the assembled crowd for their support.
‘‘All that is on my mind is to be back home and to be back with my family,’’ she said to those who attended the march to the Islamic Centre of England in Maida Vale, northwest London, to hand in an open letter written by a group of local mothers asking for Zaghariratcliffe’s release from the Tehran prison.
‘‘I’m so grateful for everybody’s support and love . . . I am so overwhelmed and moved,’’ she added.
At the protest the actress Emma Thompson criticised the ‘‘bunch of angry molecules bumping around in Westminster’’ and urged the government to do more to bring Zaghari-ratcliffe home.
Thompson said Johnson should ‘‘deal with the problem he’s so seriously exacerbated’’. – The Times