Iran in new claims about jailed British mum – but ‘evidence’ is 7 years out of date
IRAN was accused yesterday of trying to justify jailing a British mother after showing seven-year-old ‘evidence’ that she plotted against the regime.
Charity worker Nazanin ZaghariRatcliffe, who is serving five years in a Tehran prison, is accused of training Iranian journalists.
In a seven-minute special report of her case, Iranian state television broadcast information from 2010, including close-ups of a pay stub from her previous employer, the BBC World Service Trust.
It also included an email from June 2010 in which she wrote about the ‘ZigZag Academy,’ a BBC World Service Trust project which trained ‘young aspiring journalists from Iran and Afghanistan through a secure online platform’.
Mrs Zaghari- Ratcliffe, 39, was arrested 19 months ago during a holiday to Iran with her young daughter Gabriella to see family.
She is accused of recruiting for the banned BBC Persian service and the ‘deployment of undercover reporters’ to ‘gather intelligence’.
Boris Johnson has faced calls to resign over fears her sentence would be doubled after he wrongly said she had been training journalists in Iran.
The Foreign Secretary later corrected himself, but Iranian state media seized on Mr Johnson’s comments as an ‘admission of guilt’.
Her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, said the new report and other Iranian comments about his wife seemed timed to exert as much pressure as possible on the British government.
He said the material appeared to be from his wife’s email, which investigators from the hard-line Revolutionary Guard immediately got access to
‘Trying to justify charges’
after her arrest. ‘It’s trying to justify the new charges,’ Mr Ratcliffe said.
Reporting on the documents about Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s previous work for the BBC, Iran Press TV alleged: ‘The ZigZag academy, the documents suggest, pursued two main goals, namely training and recruitment of human resources for the launch of BBC Persian service and deployment of undercover reporters in Iran to gather intelligence.’
The BBC said Mrs ZaghariRatcliffe worked for the BBC World Service Trust between February 2009 and October 2010 after some short-term contract work as an assistant for a project in Iraq, but had stopped working for the corporation years before she visited Iran last year. The new allegations come as the UK considers making a £400million payment to Iran, to clear an outstanding debt that Tehran says London owes for Chieftain tanks that were paid for but never delivered in the 1970s.
Authorities in both countries deny that the payment has any link to Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe.
A BBC Media Action spokesman added: ‘As we have always made clear, Nazanin ZaghariRatcliffe never worked for BBC Persian. She was not involved in the establishment of BBC Persian TV.
‘[She] was never a journalism trainer but undertook administrative duties such as travel bookings, typing, and filing.’