Tortured and blindfolded — as her little girl prays she’ll be out for Christmas
FOR a woman supposedly leaving for a daring, clandestine operation to overthrow a foreign state, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe packed very oddly.
Rather than secret radios or James Bond- style gadgets, the new mother took few of her own clothes, so as to leave space for all the essentials needed to transport an 18-month-old toddler.
The nappies, clothes, baby wipes and bottles were packed at home in West hampstead, North-west London, where Nazanin lived with her english husband, Richard, a City accountant, and their daughter Gabriella.
The family drove to Gatwick airport on March 17 last year, had a meal at Giraffe cafe, and chased after Gabriella as she ran through the airport giggling, her favourite blue rucksack on her back with a Peppa Pig toy inside.
A dual British- Iranian national, Nazanin was flying to Iran to show her parents their new granddaughter. But, rather than joy, the trip turned into the stuff of nightmares.
Today, more than 18 months after setting off, Nazanin is being held at Tehran’s notorious evin prison, a hellish place with secret cells where torture and sexual assault of prisoners is rife.
Nazanin, 38, was arrested at Tehran Imam Khomeini International Airport as she prepared to board a flight back to London on April 3. She was hustled out of the airport and then disappeared. It later transpired that she had been held for 45 days in solitary confinement without access to a lawyer.
her crime? According to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, the charity worker was ‘identified and arrested after massive intelligence operations’ and was one of ‘the heads of foreign-linked hostile networks’.
her family assume this may have been because of her job with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, whose stated aim is to ‘bring together corporations, civil society, activists, philanthropists and top decision-makers to tackle some of the world’s most pressing issues’.
She was also alleged to have conducted ‘various missions… leading her criminal activities under the direction of media and intelligence services of foreign governments’.
Family in Iran received a phone call from the Revolutionary Guards saying her investigation ‘relates to an issue of national security’. The authorities separated Nazanin from her daughter and confiscated her British passport. eventually, Gabriella was looked after by her grandparents. Richard, who had stayed in London, has been unable to obtain a visa to Iran. Feeling powerless, he pleaded for help to the British Government, saying: ‘There has been no due process, no formal charges, no access to a lawyer, no explanation and no one has been able to see her.
‘I cannot see how this could be based on any substance. It’s studied cruelty.
‘If your national security is chasing young mothers and babies that is just crazy.’
In the meantime, it was reported that Nazanin had received a fiveyear jail sentence on a spying charge after a secret trial.
And so the case dragged on until Boris Johnson’s maladroit comments to the Commons foreign affairs select committee last week, playing into the Tehran regime’s hands by saying Nazanin was ‘teaching people journalism’.
The comment – which Johnson has since made clear was a mistake – provided the excuse for Iran’s Revolutionary Council to haul Nazanin to a special court hearing in evin prison.
Weak, depressed and with her hair falling out from trauma, she was told her sentence would be doubled and she’d have to serve another five years in jail. Iranian officials said: ‘ Mr Johnson’s statement has shed new light on the realities about Nazanin, which has been strongly denied previously by both her family and human rights activists such as [Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner] Shirin ebadi.’ The Iranian high Council’s website now carries a story headlined ‘UK confirms Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was not in Iran for holiday,’ adding: ‘[Johnson’s] statement shows that Nazanin had visited the country for anything but a holiday.’ So what is the truth? The facts suggest that the Iran government, not for the first time, is guilty of a monstrous miscarriage of justice. Of course, it was Iran which imposed a death sentence on Salman Rushdie in 1989 for alleged blasphemy in his book, The Satanic Verses.
Nazanin had always been open about her work, first as an administrative assistant for the BBC as a young graduate, and then with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, a charity which helps train journalists abroad.
Yet Thomson Reuters does not operate in Iran, so why would she use a quick visit to see her parents to ‘teach people journalism’?
THOMSON group chief executive Monique Villa says: ‘She has nothing to do with Iran in her work and the foundation doesn’t work with Iran anyway, so we have no idea why she has been detained.’
What’s more, Nazanin’s family point out she would hardly endanger her daughter by doing anything that would attract the attention of the hardliners who run the country, nor would she endanger the lives of her elderly parents who live there. The truth is that Iran’s laws are so flexible that anyone can be charged with virtually anything, should the state security apparatus demand it.
Charges drawn from the Islamic Penal Code include ‘gathering and colluding to commit crimes against national security’, ‘forming a group composed of more than two people with the purpose of disrupting national security’ and/or ‘membership of a group with the purpose of disrupting national security’.
Other charges commonly used to prosecute human rights defenders include ‘spreading propaganda against the system’, ‘insulting the Supreme Leader’ and ‘insulting Islamic sanctities’.
Nazanin was initially taken from Tehran to a jail hundreds of miles away called Kerman Central, where she was held in solitary confinement in the Revolutionary Guards’ interrogation facility. According to her husband, she was questioned for days in a bare room under a single light-bulb, and told she would never see her child or family again.
he said the authorities seemed convinced that her work with Thomson Reuters and previous job as an assistant for BBC Media Action (the corporation’s international development charity) posed a threat to Iranian national security.
he says they told her: ‘If you just co-operate, this will be over. We’ll let you phone your family.’
Nazanin grew up in Tehran and was a gifted pupil who studied english literature at the city’s university. her language skills led to her to be hired as a translator for international charities such as the Red Cross and the World health Organisation.
She was awarded a scholarship to study for a masters at London Met University, and met Richard through a mutual friend. They married in Winchester in 2009, which made a Nanzanin a dual British-Iranian national, and their daughter was born in 2014. Meanwhile, Richard’s career thrived and he became an auditor in the City.
The family had travelled to Iran before without any difficulty, and visa applications meant the authorities were aware of their employment records.
Speaking yesterday of his wife’s ordeal, Richard said: ‘She put on a brave face as always, but our daughter picked up on the fact that her grandparents were upset at having just heard about the sudden new charges.
‘Gabriella is very sensitive and aware. She’s obviously getting older so she understands more what’s happening around her – but not everything. She knows Mummy
is in prison and thinks of me as being in prison as well because we are only able to communicate via Skype.
Gabriella thinks it is some sort of “phone prison”. She told her Mummy on Sunday that she was praying to God for her to be released.’ Richard also says his wife has been subjected to psychological torture – held in solitary confinement with a light permanently on, and blindfolded when taken outside.
‘The worst period was in Kerman,’ he told me. ‘When Nazanin came out of solitary there, she was unable to walk unaided.’ After becoming depressed and suicidal, Nazanin was moved from solitary confinement to the women’s ward where she now shares a cell with six other so-called enemies of the regime.
Heartbreakingly, father and daughter maintain their relationship almost 3,500 miles apart by playing games on the phone. ‘She reads to her dollies with me on the phone. We do the best we can,’ he says. Nazanin has been allowed weekly visits from her daughter, and her hus- band has promised not to bring Gabriella back to London until his wife is freed.
Until this week, Richard had hoped his wife would be released before Christmas. He says: ‘My wife only went to Iran to show off her baby to family and friends. She was doing the most normal thing in the world. How they can make up these charges is difficult to comprehend.’