The father of a toddler stranded in Iran without her parents has left a birthday card on the doorstep of the Iranian embassy to mark her second birthday.

Richard Ratcliffe, from West Hampstead, London, sang Happy Birthday to his daughter Gabriella over Skype as he hosted a teddy bears’ picnic in Hyde Park near the embassy in central London. Family and friends clutching banners, balloons and bears marched across the road to the embassy, where they waved to a “delighted” Gabriella, who laughed and blew kisses.

Ratcliffe’s wife, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian national, has been held without charge since being seized by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard on 3 April. She was separated from her daughter after being stopped at Imam Khomeini airport in Tehran as the pair tried to return to the UK from a family holiday.

Gabriella’s British passport was confiscated by the Iranian authorities and her mother is being detained 621 miles (1,000km) from her in Kerman prison. The toddler is being looked after by her grandparents, and under Iranian law only her father or mother can bring her home.

Chris Ratcliffe, Richard Ratcliffe’s brother, said the family were “desperately worried” about Gabriella and her mother. He said of his conversations with the toddler: “Sometimes you speak to her at the end of a call and she just gets really upset and keeps asking for her mum, which is the most heartbreaking part. You just see how she’s the youngest victim of all this.”

The 30-year-old from Greenwich, south-east London, said his niece had been “delighted” during the Skype call, during which he used a selfie stick so that everyone could see her face.

He said: “She loved it – she was smiling and giggling. Before, I asked her ‘what song would you like to hear?’ and she said ‘Happy Birthday’. She doesn’t get to see her cousins very often so it was nice for them to say hello. She was waving and blowing kisses at them.”



Gabriella’s father, 41, said the toddler was “slightly confused” at first, then happy to be clapping along during the call. “Today is quite a happy day. Her birthday is tomorrow and that will be a sad day,” he said.

He said support from the public – more than 750,000 people have signed a Change.org petition to free Nazanin – was “really really powerful” and an “important factor in keeping me going”.

“I look at all these lovely comments, and some of them are so beautiful they’ll bring tears to my eyes; the energy and the love and the kindness that’s out there,” he said.



He plans to spend Saturday with his parents, when they will call Gabriella, whose grandparents in Iran are throwing a party. His in-laws do not speak any English, so they are talking to Gabriella in Farsi, which he called a “silver lining in the cloud”. He said the last few months had been tough for the whole family, including his nieces and nephews.



It has been more than two months since Nazanin, 37, was imprisoned.

Ratcliffe says his wife has been interrogated and held in solitary confinement, which Iranian authorities say is over a serious issue of “national security”.

Thousands of people have been sending cards to Iranian embassies across the world as part of the Free Nazanin campaign. A Change.org petition was delivered to Downing Street in May, calling on the prime minister to intervene, and Ratcliffe hopes to have it delivered to Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, when it has 1m signatures.

Tulip Siddiq, Ratcliffe’s local MP, attended the picnic, where people signed a birthday card. The Labour MP for Hampstead and Kilburn said: “My baby is nine weeks old today, and I can’t imagine being away from her for even a day. Richard has had to put up with endless days of being away from Gabriella with no kind of end in sight. So for me, my priorities are to push the Foreign Office to do something about this, and the prime minister. I’ve asked him for a meeting and I’d like a response to my letter. But if the prime minister and the Foreign Office can’t protect British two-year-olds being held in Iran then what’s the point of them?”