Gabriella, five, to leave Iran, where mother remains in jail on charges of spying

The imprisoned British-Iranian woman Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is sending her daughter back from Tehran to be schooled in England, saying the separation will leave her a “desolate mother ready to burn like a desert dune”.

In a letter smuggled out of Tehran prison and published by the Centre for Human Rights in Iran, Zaghari-Ratcliffe writes: “In the near future my baby will leave me to go with her father and start school in the UK. It will be daunting trip for her travelling and for me left behind, And the authorities who hold me will watch on unmoved at the injustice of separation. That first day of school not for me”.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who was arrested in Tehran on espionage charges in 2016, had kept her daughter, Gabriella, now five, in the city with her grandmother in an effort to minimise the trauma of separation while her husband Richard has campaigned to secure her release in the UK – often offending both the Iranian authorities and the UK Foreign Office.

The Iranians do not recognise dual citizenship, and so officially reject all requests by the British government for consular access.

Play Video 6:21 Richard Ratcliffe's determined fight to free wife Nazanin from an Iranian jail – video

The former UK foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt described her letter as agonising to read and added: “If there was ever a moment for Iran to show some humanity it is now. Let this innocent woman who has suffered so much come home”.

Part of the hurt revealed in Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s letter stems from the release of other political prisoners while she remains, and repeatedly reflects on her loss as a mother.

The letter also reveals a deep anger with both the British and Iranian governments for failing to come to a deal over the terms of the release of as much as £400m the government admits it owes to the Iranians due to the incomplete sale of Chieftain tanks to Iran in 1979.

Both Iran and Britain insist the 40-year-long dispute between the two governments is not linked to her imprisonment, but London has accused Tehran of keeping her hostage to extract other concessions from the UK.

The Iranian foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, at the UN general assembly accused British ministers of backing out of a deal to hand over the money, adding the handover might have eased her likely release from prison.

The UK has held back paying the money for a mixture of political and legal reasons, including a court dispute over the amount of interest payable and the entity to which the cash could be sent without breaching EU sanctions law.

In her letter, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe says: “Last week my country put me on sale, in return for a huge amount of money using me for its own political benefits. Was it a surprise ? My hope for freedom from my own country died in my heart years back.

“My country did not defend me or my baby’s rights but marketed me for its negotiations. Even now I remains a pawn in the hands of politicians – abroad and in Iran – to reach their goals in their game of chess. Some have used every opportunity these past years to use a mother and baby as a political leverage.

In remarks directed at Iran, she says: “It is such a bitter feeling. My country talks constantly about the the separation of the Yemeni, Syrian and Palestinian mothers from their children Yet it remains blind to the separation of a mother and baby in her homeland. It even adds to the pain”.

In a sign of how resistant Iran is to pleas to release foreign nationals, Iran on Thursday told France to cease trying to intervene in the case of the French-Iranian dual national Fariba Adelkhah. Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Seyyed Abba Mousavi said French meddling had no legal basis.

Russia was also at loggerheads with Iran on Friday, summoning the Iranian ambassador to Moscow after a Russian reporter, Yulia Yusik, was detained in Tehran by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.

The impasse over the payment of the Chieftain tank cash is striking since this week the UK Treasury completed an out-of-court settlement to pay £1.3bn to Bank Mellat, an privately owned Iranian bank. The means of payment has not been disclosed, but it is not subject to sanctions. The bank was banned in 2009 from operating in Europe due to links with the Iranian nuclear programme, but the ban was quashed in 2013.

Profile Who is Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe? Show Hide Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is an Iranian-British dual national who has been jailed in Iran since April 2016. She has been accused of attempting to orchestrate a “soft overthrow” of the Islamic Republic. She and her three-year-old daughter, Gabriella, were about to return to the UK from Iran after a family visit when she was arrested. Since then, she has spent most of her time in Evin prison in Tehran, separated from her daughter. In January 2019 she went on hunger strike for three days in protest against being denied medical care in Tehran’s Evin prison. In March, the UK Foreign Office granted her diplomatic protection, a step that raised her case from a consular matter to the level of a dispute between the two states. Zaghari-Ratcliffe worked for BBC Media Action between February 2009 and October 2010 before moving to Thomson Reuters Foundation, the news agency’s charitable arm, as a project manager. Her family has always said that she was in Iran on holiday. Photograph: Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe/PA