London mayor calls for Briton jailed in Iran to be freed before 40th birthday on Boxing Day

The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has thrown his weight behind calls for a British woman jailed in Iran to be released ahead of her 40th birthday on Boxing Day.

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian who works for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, was arrested at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini airport in April 2016.

The mother from Hampstead in north London was later sentenced to five years in jail for spying, a charge she denies.

Khan and her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, said in a statement: “Nazanin has been wrongly detained in an Iranian prison for over two years. She has done nothing wrong, has broken no laws. The charges against her are completely false.

“She is innocent and should not be kept in prison, separated for so long from her family and her young daughter. While she’s imprisoned, Nazanin continues to suffer both physically and mentally.

“We, and indeed the whole country, know what a travesty of justice it is that Nazanin continues to be detained. Her case, and also those of other dual-nationality prisoners being wrongly held in Iran, have rightly attracted global interest and deep concern.

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

Nazanin was not the only innocent Londoner to be incarcerated in Iran: “London is home to a large Iranian community who make a valuable contribution to this great, diverse city. Together, we are united in calling on the Iranian authorities to release Nazanin immediately along with the others who are being wrongly detained, to allow them to return home and be reunited with their loved ones.

“With Christmas approaching and, as Nazanin turns 40 on Boxing Day, we are calling on the Iranian authorities to release her at once so she can return home and be reunited with her family.”

The foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, pressed his Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Zarif, about Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s case when they met in New York in September on the fringes of the UN general assembly.

The director of Amnesty International UK, Kate Allen, said: “What should have been a day of celebration for Nazanin will once again be a day of anguish, her third birthday behind bars. Despite everything, we send Nazanin our warmest wishes.

“Nazanin is a prisoner of conscience who should never have been jailed in the first place. The UK government should continue to press for Nazanin’s release using every channel of communication available to it.”