BRITISH-IRANIAN WOMAN ENDS FIVE-YEAR SENTENCE

A British-Iranian woman held in an Iranian prison for five years on widely refuted spying charges ended her sentence on Sunday, her lawyer said, although she faces a new trial and cannot yet return home to London.

The twists and turns of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s years-long case have sparked international outrage and strained already fraught diplomatic ties between Britain and Iran.

Although Zaghari-Ratcliffe completed her full sentence and was allowed to remove her ankle monitor and leave house arrest, her future remains uncertain amid a long-running debt dispute between Britain and Iran and rising regional tensions.

“It feels to me like they have made one blockage just as they have removed another, and we very clearly remain in the middle of this government game of chess,” her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, said.

Iranian state-run media reported that she has been summoned to court on March 14 over murky new charges, including “spreading propaganda,” which were first announced last fall. Her trial was then indefinitely postponed, stirring hopes for her return home when her sentence ended. Authorities released her on furlough last March due to the surging coronavirus pandemic, and she has remained in detention at her parents’ home in Tehran since.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe, 43, was sentenced to five years in jail after being convicted of plotting to overthrow Iran’s government, a charge that she, her supporters and rights groups vigorously deny. She was taken into custody at the airport with her toddler daughter after visiting family on holiday in Tehran in 2016. At the time, she was working for Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of the news agency.

The United Nations has described her arrest as arbitrary, and reported that her treatment, including stints in solitary confinement and deprivation of medical care, could amount to torture.