New Delhi: Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian charity worker who was in an Iranian jail for almost five years for alleged sedition charges, has finally arrived back to her home in the UK after spending nearly six years imprisoned in Iran’s capital Tehran.
In the early hours of this morning, Zaghari-Ratcliffe came out of the airplane wearing a yellow stall over a blue dress, indicating the colors of Ukraine.
Here, we’ve brought a historical account of why Zaghari was arrested in the first place and what does it has to do with the debt owed by UK to Iran.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a 41-year-old charity worker with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, was arrested at Tehran airport in April 2016 as she headed back to Britain with her daughter after a family visit.
She was sentenced to five years in jail after being convicted of plotting to overthrow Iran’s clerical establishment.
Her family and the Foundation, however, denied the charges.
In 2017, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who was then the Foreign Secretary, attracted criticism for appearing to jeopardize Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s case when he suggested at a parliamentary hearing that she had been training journalists in Iran prior to her arrest.
He had later apologized for his comments.
CNN stated that Johnson’s comments had appeared to lead to Zaghari-Ratcliffe being summoned to an unscheduled court hearing, at which his remarks were cited as proof that she had engaged in “propaganda against the regime.”
According to CNN, she had been under house arrest for almost a year due to the coronavirus pandemic. “Still trying to get a handle on what is going on — but the news is mixed,” Richard Ratcliffe, her husband, told CNN.
