F is for FREE AT LAST

Nazanin Zaghari-ratcliffe was 37 years old when she was snatched by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards in April 2016. She had been in the country for Nowruz (Iranian New Year) with her 22-month-old daughter, Gabriella, and was about to fly home to her husband, Richard, in London.

The charges – originally spying – were always spurious. In reality, Zaghari-ratcliffe was taken as a geopolitical pawn in a decades-long standoff between the British and Iranian governments. The dual national would go on to spend more than 2,000 days in detention, including seven months in solitary confinement. Both she and Richard would also risk their health conducting numerous hunger strikes – the latter, with the help of the family’s local MP Tulip Siddiq, campaigning relentlessly to keep his wife’s plight in the news.

Finally, after six years, Zaghari-ratcliffe was released on 16 March, after the UK settled a nearly £400 million debt to Iran. ‘How many foreign secretaries does it take for someone to come home?’ Zaghari-ratcliffe would ask, sounding as if she was setting up a joke. The shameful answer was five. In the end it was Liz Truss who oversaw the release.

At RAF Brize Norton, as Zaghari-ratcliffe and Anoosheh Ashoori, another British-iranian national released after a similar ordeal, walked down the plane’s stairs, Gabriella, now seven, could be heard asking, ‘Is that Mummy?’ That night, she slept between her reunited parents for the first time since she was a toddler.

Zaghari-ratcliffe has since become a symbol of defiance against the Iranian regime. In September, after two weeks of demonstrations over the death of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, in police custody in Tehran after allegedly breaching rules requiring women to cover their hair with a hijab, she filmed herself cutting her hair, in line with protestors.

‘For my mother, for my daughter, for the fear of solitary confinement, for the women of my country, for freedom,’ Zaghari-ratcliffe said at the end of the video. More than almost anybody, she knows the price of that.

Nazanin Zaghari-ratcliffe, photographed after her release