Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe has endured a five-year nightmare after being arrested and jailed in Iran while on holiday. But now as her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, and the Guardian’s Patrick Wintour explain, having served her sentence she is being threatened with further charges
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was on holiday in Iran in 2016 visiting her parents with her 22-month-old daughter when she was arrested at Tehran airport and held on what she was eventually told were national security charges. Her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, tells Anushka Asthana that it was then that the five-year nightmare began. And very soon he suspected that his wife was not merely a prisoner, but a pawn in a geopolitical struggle dating back to the 1970s and an unpaid debt owed by Britain to Iran.
The Guardian’s diplomatic editor, Patrick Wintour, has reported extensively on the story and describes the deal the UK had struck with the shah of Iran for a consignment of British-made tanks shortly before his downfall. Iran had paid for them but the delivery was cancelled amid the Iranian revolution that installed an Islamic theocracy in place of the shah. Following decades of poor relations and demands for the debt to be repaid, Nazanin was arrested and charged with crimes that the regime presented no evidence for and never explained to her.
