This is another cruel twist in a monstrous game of mental torture

The Iranian regime never delivers good news without a side order of disappointment. Yesterday’s announcement that Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe has had her ankle tag removed after four years in prison and a year under house arrest could not be left for her to savour.

While this move raised the prospect of the British-Iranian mother’s imminent return home to her family here in the UK, Tehran simultaneously told Nazanin she would face a new court case on Sunday.

It was just the latest twist in a cruel game of psychological torture inflicted on Nazanin, now 42, and her husband Richard – who has campaigned tirelessly for her release – as well as their daughter Gabriella, six.

Some had dared to believe she might soon be heading home. But allowing the family to get its hopes up and then finding new ways to inflict more pain has become a hallmark of Iran’s treatment of Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who was arrested in 2016 on charges of spying and plotting to overthrow the Government. She denies the charges and the British Government has always maintained her innocence.

This game of snakes and ladders with a mother’s fate is monstrous.

Knowing that the judge hearing her new case in a week’s time is the very same one who sentenced her to five years imprisonment can also only cause Nazanin further anxiety.

Remarkably for someone with such a cloud hanging over her, Nazanin, with her ankle tag removed, has been reported as having recently visited the families of people she met in prison, hoping to give them comforting news about their loved ones.

That is a moral lesson for all of us, but most of all for her persecutors.

WITH every day that passes, what Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab called her ‘cruel and intolerable ordeal’ only worsens Tehran’s image in the eyes of fair-minded observers.

even those who might accept the argument that Britain owes Iran repayment for undelivered Chieftain battle tanks ordered by the Shah in the 1970s (America has since paid up in a similar case) find this seizure of state hostages abhorrent.

As Iran works to persuade President Joe Biden to lift the sanctions imposed by his White house predecessor Donald Trump, what kind of message does tormenting Nazanin send to America’s negotiators?

And as Tehran prepares to enter negotiations with the international community over its controversial nuclear programme, cases such as Nazanin’s sabotage the trust necessary to agree any revised deal – one vital to avert a new nuclear crisis.

Contrast these sorry events with recent scenes in neighbouring Iraq.

On Saturday, the local Ayatollah Sistani met Pope Francis in the holy city of Najaf. The two religious leaders urged peace and reconciliation in a country riven by religious and sectarian conflict.

BUT Iran’s ruling Ayatollah Khamenei is a ruthless political leader, not a man of God. For him, the cold calculations of realpolitik matter most.

And though he and his goons may have little sympathy for the suffering Zaghari-Ratcliffe family, much of the world does.

By itself, Iran’s release of Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe back to her family in Britain would not remove all the tensions between the West and the Islamic Republic.

But drawing a line under years of brutal imprisonment and the psychological torture caused by splitting up a family could set a marker that much of the world would notice.

Prolonging this family’s agony for political reasons flies in the face of Iran’s own interests. It must begin to deal with the rest of the world on fair and reasonable terms – for who would ever trust a regime whose cold-hearted rulers play vicious mind-games with a mother and her child?

It is time Nazanin came home – once and for all.