LONDON: Britain on Sunday played down a report that dual national Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe could be released from years of detention in Iran, after slamming her treatment as “torture”.
The government said talks were still continuing, after Iranian state TV said she could be freed soon as part of a wider prisoner release and the repayment by Britain of an old debt.
“We continue to explore options to resolve this 40-year-old case and will not comment further as legal discussions are ongoing,” a Foreign Office spokesperson said, in reference to the debt.
The British-Iranian woman has been held in Iran since 2016. In late April, she was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment and banned from leaving the country for a further 12 months.
Her husband Richard Ratcliffe said he had heard talk of a prisoner swap and payments, amid ongoing nuclear negotiations between Iran and Western countries.
“But we haven’t been given any private indication that an agreement is close,” he told AFP. “I don’t think Nazanin would have been sentenced if we were.” Speaking earlier Sunday before the Iranian report emerged, British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said Zaghari-Ratcliffe was being held “unlawfully” and “being treated in the most abusive” way.
“I think it amounts to torture the way she’s being treated, and there is a very clear, unequivocal obligation on the Iranians to release her,” he told BBC television.
Ratcliffe argues his wife is being held hostage as part of a diplomatic stratagem.
“I think it’s very difficult to argue against that characterisation,” Raab said, going further than previous UK denunciations over the case.
“It is clear that she is subjected to a cat and mouse game that the Iranians, or certainly part of the Iranian system, engage with and they try and use her for leverage on the UK.”
Richard Ratcliffe has linked his wife’s plight to a British debt of £400 million ($550 million, 460 million euros) for army tanks paid for by the shah of Iran. When the shah was ousted in the 1979 revolution, Britain refused to deliver the tanks to the new Islamic republic. London admits it owes Iran over the contract involving a British intermediate company, International Military Services (IMS), but is reportedly constrained by international sanctions in its ability to repay.
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