Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe to send daughter home to UK
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is giving up weekly visits from her daughter so she can start school in the UK. …
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A British-Iranian woman jailed in Iran is to send her daughter home to the UK to start school, she has said in an open letter.
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was jailed for five years in 2016 after being convicted of spying, which she denies.
Her family insist she was in Iran to introduce her daughter to relatives.
Five-year-old Gabriella – who has been living with her grandparents in Tehran – has visited her mother at least once a week since her arrest.
She will be back in London before Christmas, according to the Times.
Her family told the paper they had agreed Gabriella should return to the UK for the start of the school year in September but postponed the decision after Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe was taken to a psychiatric hospital.
Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe, 40, was returned to prison after a week but not permitted phone calls with her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, who is in London.
In an open letter addressed to “the mothers of Iran”, Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe, from West Hampstead, pleaded with the Iranian authorities to free her so she can return to London with Gabriella.
“I have no hope or motivation after my baby goes. There is no measure to my pain,” she wrote in the letter, which was smuggled out of Tehran’s Evin prison and published online in Farsi and English.
She said her daughter’s journey back to the UK would be “a 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,” she added.
Mr Ratcliffe told the Times his wife is giving up weekly visits with Gabriella to allow her to live in Britain, where she was born.
Last week, Prime Minister Boris Johnson called for the release of Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe during a meeting with Iran’s president.
In 2017, when he was foreign secretary, Mr Johnson apologised after saying she was in Iran “teaching people journalism” – despite her family’s insistence she was there to visit relatives.
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