Iran made me sign false confession to be freed, says Zaghari-Ratcliffe

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe says she was forced to sign a false confession in front of a UK government witness before she was allowed to leave Iran after being kept there for six years on fabricated charges of attempting to overthrow the regime.

The British-Iranian dual citizen told the BBC the act was captured on camera by Iran at Baghdad International Airport and she expected the pictures to be used against her.

She was freed along with Anoosheh Ashoori, another British-Iranian, after the UK paid a decades-old $523 million debt to Tehran over an arms deal that was aborted after the 1979 revolution.

The charity worker said she was taken to the airport by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps without seeing her parents in March when she was due to be freed.

“Instead I was made to sign the forced confession at the airport in the presence of the British government,” Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe said.

“They told me that ‘you won’t be able to get on the plane’. And I knew that was like a last-minute game because … they told me that they had been given the money.

“So what is the point of making me sign a piece of paper which is incorrect? It’s a false confession.”

She said a British official was there when the document was signed.

“The whole thing of me signing the forced confession was filmed,” Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe said.

“It’s a tool. So I’m sure they will show that some day.”

Her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, this month alluded to “mistakes made at the end” of her ordeal in Iran.

Speaking after his wife’s first meeting with UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson since her release, Mr Ratcliffe said: “I think there are lessons to learn; there is a wider problem.

“We talked about the mistakes made at the end. It was rough at the end and I think, when Nazanin is ready to talk about it, that is something that we need to go through.”