March 17, 2022 Thursday 7:50 am
| MTI
A Boeing 757, chartered by the British government, carrying the 43-year-old woman, landed at Brize Norton Military Airport, near the British Royal Air Force base near London, after an eight-hour flight Thursday morning.
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe first traveled from Tehran to Amman and took a private jet to bring him home there.
The British chartered Titan Airways plane – which also passed through Hungary’s airspace – was the most watched flight worldwide on real-time online civil air traffic tracking portals on Wednesday night and Thursday dawn.
At Brize Norton Air Force Base, British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss was waiting for Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe next to her husband and seven-year-old daughter.
Another British-Iranian, Anousheh Ashouri, who was detained by Iranian authorities in 2017 and sentenced to ten years in prison for espionage, also arrived at his home on the same plane.
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, director of programs at the London-based Thomson Reuters Foundation, traveled to Iran in 2016 with her young daughter, who was born in Britain, to visit her family. When he wanted to return to London, he was arrested at Tehran airport and sentenced to five years in prison for attempting to overthrow the Iranian regime and spying.
Of these, he spent four years in Evin Prison in Tehran, after which he could remain under house arrest at his parents’ home, but had to wear an electronic tracking device on his ankle.
Just a year ago, Iranian authorities announced the release of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, and the removal of the tracker.
But at the same time, he was told that he was still unable to return to Britain, and that he would even be tried again in Tehran.
His lawyer said in April last year that his student had been sentenced to another year in prison for participating in a demonstration 12 years ago in front of the Iranian embassy in London and for giving an interview to the BBC’s Persian News Service.
After that, he no longer had to go to prison again.
On Tuesday, the Iranian authorities returned his British passport, and he was released on Wednesday evening and allowed to leave Tehran.
British husband Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, Richard Ratcliffe, has been fighting for his wife’s release for years. I also went on a hunger strike for weeks last fall.
Richard Ratcliffe has also repeatedly expressed the view that Iran’s official actions against his wife were manifestations of “Iranian negotiation tactics” in a decades-old payment dispute.
According to British media reports, this was clearly indicated by the Iranian authorities. At the time of the first criminal proceedings, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was informed that his lawsuit was connected to an arms deal more than forty years ago.
Iran still orders 1,500 Chieftain tanks from Britain during the reign of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, but the British side did not fulfill the order after the 1979 Islamic coup in Iran.
Tehran demanded 393.8 million pounds (177 billion HUF) from London in exchange for costs and benefits in the failed deal, and the legal battle between the two parties has dragged on for decades.
However, British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, in a parliamentary statement on Wednesday, acknowledged Iran’s claim. The British government soon announced that the debt had already been paid to Tehran, with the order that the amount could only be used for humanitarian purposes.
But Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirollahian told the BBC on Thursday that it would be “a mistake” to link the release of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe to the settlement of the dispute. Tehran said its decision was taken on humanitarian grounds.
