A senior Iranian prosecutor says that a British-Iranian woman has been held in solitary confinement for three months because she helped to design a website.
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was arrested at Tehran airport with her two-year-old daughter on her way home to London on 3 April. Neither she nor her husband, Richard, were told why she had been arrested until last week, when the Revolutionary Guard issued a statement describing her as a spy.
Now Iranian prosecutor Yadollah Movahed has revealed the first details about the 37-year-old’s case, saying that she was implicated in the 2009 protests known as Iran’s Green Movement, even though she was in Britain at the time.
When hardline president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was re-elected by a landslide, thousands of Iranians protested, accusing the authorities of rigging the election – an event known as “the Sedition” by Iranian authorities. The movement was described as the “Twitter revolution” by some, when the social media network was in its infancy, because activists used the internet to coordinate their actions.
A report from Iran’s Mizan news agency on Friday quoted Movahed, head of the justice department in Kerman where Zaghari-Ratcliffe is being held, 600 miles from her daughter in Tehran.
“In 2014-2015, the intelligence service of the Revolutionary Guards in Kerman province identified and arrested members of one of the groups that during the Sedition conducted activities against the security of the country by designing websites and carrying out campaigns in the media,” Movahed said. “Some of the group were outside Iran, including the suspect Nazanin Zaghari.”
The only previous account of Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s arrest came on 15 June when the Revolutionary Guard said she had plotted the “soft overthrow of the Islamic Republic” through “her membership of foreign companies and institutions” and as one of the “heads of foreign-linked hostile networks”.
By speaking publicly about the case, the Kerman prosecutor may be attempting to persuade other authorities in Iran that their investigation has merit.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe works as a programme manager for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of the news agency. She was initially stopped at Tehran airport when officials said there was a problem with her passport. Her daughter Gabriella’s passport was confiscated and the two-year-old was handed over to her grandparents.
Initially, Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s husband, Richard Ratcliffe, 41, followed Foreign Office advice not to make the case public, but spoke out after hearing from former detainees of the Republican Guard that his wife would be held in solitary confinement and continually interrogated.
Three days after launching a petition, Zaghari-Ratcliffe was transferred to another prison and allowed a family visit. Ratcliffe described the awful physical toll that imprisonment had taken on his wife. “At that point she couldn’t stand, she was terribly weak, she had to have Gabriella lifted on to her,” he said.
“She couldn’t walk without blackouts, her hair was falling out. What they do is a very nasty psychological process to break your spirit. I don’t think there’s anyone whacking her with a stick or anything – we’ll never know until she’s out – but she was clearly very, very traumatised.”
It appeared she would be released but the Revolutionary Guard called her parents to say there had been “a mistake”.
Ratcliffe said that the elite Revolutionary Guard, which monitors the country’s Islamic system and is said to be more powerful than the Shia clergy, had ordered her family to stop contacting him otherwise they would also be arrested.
Since then Ratcliffe’s only contact with his daughter has been via Skype calls. She cannot leave Iran without a passport, while he has not been allowed a visa and risks being arrested on arrival in the country.
The Foreign Office says it has raised the case “repeatedly and at the highest levels” and will continue to do so at “every available opportunity”.
Ratcliffe says that after he went public, Foreign Office officials had only met him at his request. “It felt almost like the FCO resented me for going public,” he said. “I was angry, and I felt gamed. We would have a series of calls, and there would be a sort of strange dynamic, where occasionally it felt like they were almost trying to get me on record as having said how helpful [they had been].”
Other women with dual-nationality have been detained in recent weeks by the Iranian authorities. Canadian-Iranian Homa Hoodfar, a 65-year-old professor from Montreal in Canada, was a founder of the Women Living Under Muslim Laws group, headquartered in London. She was arrested on the grounds of “feminism and security” and “anti-security activities,” according to the state broadcaster IRIB.
Meanwhile, 76-year-old British businessman Kamal Foroughi has been held in jail for five years without his family being told why he was detained.
