Family’s desperate plea to free British girl held in hell-hole Iranian jail
THE families of a British travel blogger and her partner yesterday pleaded for their release from a notorious Iranian prison.
They spoke out as it emerged Jolie King and Australian boyfriend Mark Firkin have been held captive for the past 10 weeks.
Building designer Jolie, who has dual UK and Australian citizenship, is said to have spent a lengthy period locked up in solitary confinement in a “tiny one-person cell”.
In a statement their loved ones said: “Our families hope to see Mark and Jolie safely home as soon as possible.”
A second detained British woman is reported to be a Cambridge-educated academic who was lecturing at an Australian university.
Reports say the unnamed woman, who also has Australian citizenship, had already been tried on unknown charges and jailed for 10 years. The cases are not believed to be related.
Jolie and construction manager Mark, who live in Perth, left Western Australia in 2017 to drive across Asia to the UK. They were documenting their trip on social media and had more than 20,000 followers.
They were reportedly arrested for flying a drone without a licence near the capital Tehran. Drone footage was often featured in their videos.
Intimidated
Pouria Zeraati, editor in chief at Iranian television station Manoto TV, said the couple had not yet stood trial.
He said: “The family says this was a misunderstanding and Jolie and Mark were unaware of the Iranian law which bans drone flights without a licence.
“Their trial has not been held yet and it is not clear what the Islamic Republic wants out of this arrest, as no one from the judiciary or intelligence services has made any comment.”
Jolie has been held prisoner in Tehran’s Evin jail along with Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, 41. The British-Iranian mother has been detained in Iran since 2016 on spying charges.
Her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, said: “I know that the girl who is in now with Nazanin came through scared and disoriented and obviously had been quite intimidated by being interrogated for all that time in solitary.”
Richard said his wife had spent more than eight months in solitary confinement and described her cell as “about the size of a double bed” and with no windows or natural light.
Defence Secretary Ben Wallace yesterday called on Iran to “follow the international rule of law” and to “release people that are being detained in the way they have been over the last few years”.
The two women are believed to be the first British passport holders without dual Iranian nationality to be held in the country in recent years.
On Wednesday, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab met the Iranian ambassador amid growing tensions over a supertanker carrying Iranian oil being seen delivering its cargo to Syria in breach of EU sanctions.The tanker had earlier been seized by Royal Marines off Gibraltar but later released.
Mr Raab raised “serious concerns about the number of dual-national citizens held by Iran and their conditions of detention”.