Iran frees two British prisoners after paying historic debt

The balance of an old debt worth €475 million, now paid by the British government, has been the price to pay for the release of two prisoners British-Iranian dual nationals imprisoned by Iranian authorities. the manager Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and the businessman Anoosheh Ashoori They were flying to London via Oman on Wednesday after years in detention on false charges of espionage. The two have found themselves at the center of a long-running dispute between London and Tehran.

“It is the beginning of a new life”, declared on Wednesday Richard Ratcliffe waiting to be able to hug his wife, for whom he has been fighting tirelessly for the last six years. His perseverance, with letters and petitions to the government, media campaigns, demonstrations and hunger strikes, have prevented the dam situation from falling into oblivion. The imprisonment of his wife, forced to separate from Gabrielle, the daughter of both, still a baby, (now, at six years old, he hardly knows his mother), made a dent in the hearts of the British. Yesterday when breaking the news of her release, the usual imperturbable BBC presenter’s voice trembled.

Johnson’s recklessness

Nazarin, 42, had traveled in 2016 with her daughter to see her parents in Tehran. A routine vacation visit to celebrate the new year, which she took a sinister look As she was about to board the plane back home to London, she was arrested and charged with plotting to overthrow the government of Iran. She instantly had her passport withdrawn and after a first sentence of five years, which she would not be the only one of her, she was imprisoned. She was of no use that the manager of Thomson Reuters Foundation, a non-profit foundation independent of the Reuters news agency, flatly denies the charges. Boris Johnsonthen foreign minister, further aggravated his situation by misstate that Zaghari-Ratcliffe had gone to Iran to teach journalism. The comment, carried out lightly with an imprudence that should have cost him his jobwas used by the Iranian court as evidence that the accused had been engaging in “propaganda against the regime”.

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The other released, Ashoori, who has lived in the UK for 20 years, was arrested in 2017 on charges of espionage while visiting his mother in Iran and sentenced to 12 years in prison. Another convicted businessman, Morad Tahbazalso a dual national, has been released from prison but is under house arrest.

Payment and penalties

To release the two prisoners, the Iranian authorities would have demanded that the British government pay an old invoice from the 1970s, for the order of some Chieftan tanks that was not completed after the triumph of the Islamic Revolution in 1979. agreement with the Foreign Minister, Liz Trussthe payment is adjusted to those established by international sanctions on Iran and the money will only be used “in humanitarian aid.”