A million call to free mother jailed in Iran

A PETITION to free a British-Iranian mother who has been jailed for five years by a secret court in Iran had nearly a million signatures last night.

The campaign comes as MPs demand action is taken to free her immediately.

Charity worker Nazanin ZaghariRatcliffe, 37, is accused of plotting to topple the regime but her family say the claim is ludicrous and they have been given “no clear information” about the charges against her.

She was jailed for five years by Judge Salavati of Iran’s Revolutionary Court on Tuesday – the day after the UK and Iran restored full diplomatic relations.

Her sentence was only revealed on Friday, when she was allowed to telephone her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, who branded it “a punishment without a crime”.

Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe, of Hampstead, who works for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, was arrested at Tehran airport on April 3 as she was about to return to Britain after a holiday visiting family with her daughter Gabriella.

The toddler, who celebrated her second birthday in June without her mother or father, had her passport confiscated and is being cared for by her grandparents in Tehran. They speak little English.

Emily Thornberry MP, Labour’s shadow foreign secretary, is demanding the Government takes action to free her. “It is no longer good enough for Downing Street and the Foreign Office to ‘raise concerns’ about this case; it is time for them to demand answers,” she said.

“In the same week that we have restored a UK ambassador to Iran, it beggars belief that a British citizen should be jailed for five years without any statement of the charge against her, and it is grotesque that a young mother should be removed from her baby to serve as a pawn in prisoner swaps.

“The Iranian government needs to drop this case and return Nazanin to her family here in Britain.”

Her jailing was revealed days after the UK reopened an embassy in Tehran for the first time since 2011.

The petition had gathered 806,505 signatures by 9pm last night and the number was rising all the time.