Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe

CONFUSION surrounded the potential release over the bank holiday weekend of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe – the charity worker who has been locked up in Iran for the past five years.

Rumours began circulating that an agreement had been struck over a historic £400m debt between the UK and Iran which gave cause for optimism, before being scotched by the authorities in both countries.

The debt has regularly been cited as a grievance motivating Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s ongoing detention.

State media in the Iran told viewers on Sunday night that its government had reached a deal where the UK would repay the sum still owed over from an arms deal struck before the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

Iran had paid the money but did not receive the tanks it had ordered. An Iranian official had said to the state broadcaster: “The release of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe in exchange for the UK’s payment of its £400 million debt to Iran has … been finalised.”

In a series of interviews in the UK, however, government figures were less clear. Foreign secretary Dominic Raab told the BBC on Sunday that Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s treatment amounted to “torture”.

He later told a press conference held at Downing Street: “It’s incumbent on Iran unconditionally to release those who are held arbitrarily and in our view unlawfully and the reports I’m afraid are not yet accurate in terms of the suggestion of her imminent release.”

The mother-of-one from West Hampstead has been held on vague spying charges and after completing a five-year jail term in Tehran has now been sentenced to another 12 months in prison.

Mr Raab’s minister, James Cleverly told the Today programme on Bank Holiday Monday that discussions on the debt continued, but said they had not reached a conclusion.

“The situation with regards to the … military contract from the 1970s which has dragged on for decades, those negotiations are ongoing,” he said. “They have been for a long while, sadly, but they are ongoing.”

Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a charity worker with dual nationality, was arrested at a Tehran airport in 2016 as she was about to return from a holiday with family. Her new conviction last week was for allegedly plotting to overthrow the Tehran government.

She has denied all charges, both in relation to the first conviction and others brought since.

Her husband Richard Ratcliffe, who has not been able to see her in person since her arrest, has led the campaign for her freedom and at one stage held a hunger strike outside the Iranian embassy in London.

Their daughter has begun school in London.

Hampstead and Kilburn MP Tulip Siddiq, who has campaigned for Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s release, said she was pleased that Dominic Raab had acknowledged on the Andrew Marr Show that her treatment was torture.

She said she hoped the government was doing all it could to get Nazanin home,  but later added: “People seem to be being fed a false narrative that the £400m in [her] case is a ransom. It is not. It is a historic debt that the courts (and the government) have confirmed the UK owes Iran.”