The ‘mental torture continues’ for Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, stuck in Iran after she was imprisoned with the charge of ‘espionage’ during a visit to Tehran with her family.
Her local MP Tulip Siddiq has announced today that the woman has been told to ‘pack a bag for prison’ as the trial was being adjourned but, as the MP highlighted, Nazanin was given no date for the hearing and no time for a defence.
UK government could not formally attend the hearing as Iran does not recognize dual nationality and therefore denied access to the British government. Nazanin’s daughter is now six years old and lives in West Hampstead with her father Richard. He confirmed: “Nazanin is quite up and down. Every night she struggles to sleep, having nightmares about being back in prison, then in the morning we have a chat to calm her down.” The UK Foreign Office has called this latest episode “unjustified and unacceptable” and has requested Iranian Ambassador Hamid Baeidinejad to end her detention.
Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan has also given a statement:
Nazanin is stuck in Iran since 2016 when she travelled to Iran with her daughter and husband to visit her parents, she was arrested at the airport while waiting to fly back to her home in London and she was sentenced to five years imprisonment for ‘plotting to topple the Iranian government’, a charge she fiercely denied.
Nazanin has dual British and Iranian citizenship and before visiting Tehran in 2016 she lived in London with her husband Richard Ratcliffe and daughter Gabriella. She worked for the charity Thomson Reuters Foundation and had previously worked for BBC Media Action, an international development charity also providing training courses for journalists. Reportedly for this connection, the Iranian government accused her of building a ‘foreign-linked hostile network’ and Nazanin was accused by Iran of “running plans for anti-revolutionary Iranians based abroad”.
She was kept in solitary confinement, making her imprisonment a ‘mental torture’. In 2018 she was given a ‘cruel’ temporary release that saw her going out of prison temporarily then sent back with panic attacks. Since 2016, her husband Richard launched a huge online petition and underwent a hunger strike. The petition has now over 3,5 million supporters in 155 countries. In March 2020 Nazanin was temporarily given permission to leave prison and was able to live with her parents in Tehran, although under strict conditions and controls.
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