Fresh fears over Nazanin release

No sign Iran will free her next month, says husband of woman sentenced to five years

HOPE is fading for the imminent release of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe.

Her husband Richard said the lack of official preparation for her return to the UK from Iran after her sentence ends indicated nothing would happen.

The British-Iranian mother was arrested in 2016 in Iran and wrongly accused of spying.

She was sentenced to five years in prison and separated from her husband and child.

Her family are counting the days until her sentence ends on March 7, when she should be free.

But Mr Ratcliffe has not heard anything from the Foreign Office about getting her passport ready or arranging her flight to the UK.

He said: ‘It’s not impossible that a rabbit is pulled out of a hat, but at this point I think no news is bad news. If they were due to release her, I think we would have heard more before. It doesn’t give me great hope.’

He said his wife is ‘getting more and more twitchy and anxious’ as her release date approaches.

Iran is threatening to hit Mrs

Zaghari-Ratcliffe, 42, with more spying charges when her sentence ends, keeping her a prisoner.

Mr Ratcliffe said: ‘For years the worst-case scenario was that she would serve the full sentence.

‘Now we’re staring at something much worse.’

He says Iran is holding her hostage over a £400million tank debt, dating back to the Iranian revolution, which it claims Britain owes.

The charity worker was released from prison in March because of the pandemic and is under house arrest at her parents’ home in the capital, Tehran.

The couple’s six-year-old daughter Gabriella, who returned to Britain from Iran in 2019 to live with her father in London, is anxious to be reunited with her mother.

But Mr Ratcliffe said he was not reassuring his wife because he did not believe that she would be freed on March 7.

He added: ‘As time goes on Nazanin thinks it is less likely. She is calm at the moment but when we get to the end of her sentence, it’ll be a case of “what now”?’

Mr Ratcliffe is due to meet Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab this week to ask what the Government’s plan B is.

Mr Raab vowed last week to ‘leave no stone unturned’ to end the ordeal of Britons jailed in Iran.

He said: ‘The practice of arbitrarily detaining individuals as leverage over another government is indefensible.’