Nazanin’s husband on hunger strike again
NAZANIN zaghari-Ratcliffe’s husband is staging his second hunger strike in two years in protest at the Government’s ‘failure’ to secure her return to the UK.
Richard Ratcliffe made the dramatic decision following the news that his wife, a British-Iranian aid worker, lost her latest appeal against a second jail sentence in Iran.
Mrs zaghari-Ratcliffe, 43, was jailed for five years in 2016 after she was accused of plotting to overthrow the Iranian government.
Following her release earlier this year, she was charged and sentenced to another year for ‘spreading propaganda’.
She has always denied any wrongdoing and was allegedly told by Tehran authorities that she was being detained because of the UK’s
‘The UK is also letting us down’
failure to pay an outstanding £400million debt. Mr Ratcliffe yesterday began his hunger strike outside the Foreign Office in London – two years after he camped outside the Iranian Embassy for 15 days.
Blasting the move as ‘not normal’, he wrote in an online statement: ‘Of course Iran still remains the primary abuser in Nazanin’s case [but] the UK is also letting us down.
‘It is increasingly clear that Nazanin’s case could have been solved many months ago but for other diplomatic agendas.’
His MP, Labour’s Tulip Siddiq, also criticised the Government’s ‘inaction and failure’ in handling her case. Posting on Twitter, she added: ‘It should never have come to this.’
A Foreign Office spokesman said they were doing ‘all we can’ to get the mother-of-one back to the UK.