UK accused of complicity in obtaining Iran hostage’s forced confession

The UK government yesterday rejected claims by Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe that British officials were complicit in an unlawful false confession that she was forced to sign in March before she was allowed to leave Iran after six years.

Tulip Siddiq, her MP, told Parliament that Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe had ripped up an original draft of the confession at the airport but during tense hours leading up to her departure, a British official stepped in to relay the message that she could not leave unless the document was signed.

Ms Siddiq said her constituent signed only after a British official told her she would not be able to leave otherwise.

Foreign Office minister Amanda Milling told Parliament the official had not compelled Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe to sign the document but only passed on the message from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Ms Milling was repeatedly asked if the prime minister or foreign secretary had authorised the British official to reinforce the Iranian demand.

“Given the situation Iran put her in, she agreed to sign it,” Ms Milling said, as Richard Ratcliffe, the husband who campaigned for the charity worker’s release throughout her six-year ordeal, watched on from the public gallery in Westminster. “The UK official did not force Nazanin to do so.”

Mr Ratcliffe said it was “startling” that his wife had been urged by a senior UK official to sign the document before she was allowed to board an aircraft to take her out of Iran.

Rights group Redress, which worked on her behalf, has written to the UK’s Foreign Ministry calling for an inquiry.

Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe and another British-Iranian dual citizen, Anoosheh Ashoori, were released after Britain paid a $523 million debt to Tehran over an arms deal that was aborted after the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

She was arrested in April 2016 at Tehran’s international airport as she prepared to leave the country after visiting her parents.

Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe was sentenced to five years in jail on trumped-up charges of attempting to topple the regime. She was kept in the country for a further year at the end of her sentence as talks continued between the UK and Iran.

She said she was told by a judge as early as February 2018 that she was being held because of the dispute over the arms debt.