Even as she entered the airport clutching her British passport for the first time in six years, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe said she could not believe she was finally about to return home to her husband and daughter.
The last moments of her ordeal in Iran, where she had been held by the regime, in effect as a hostage, on trumped-up charges, were far from straightforward and fraught with anxieties.
Speaking to her MP, Tulip Siddiq, on Thursday night, Zaghari-Ratcliffe described how even at the airport in Tehran, conversations continued between Iranian and UK officials. Nothing was straightforward.
As she arrived to board the flight, a reporter from an Iranian news channel appeared, one she recognised and who had spread misinformation about her before one of her earlier trials, to try and bounce her into an interview.
Siddiq, the MP for Hampstead and Kilburn who has been a vociferous and dogged campaigner for Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s freedom, spoke to her on Thursday for the first time since she landed at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire in the early hours of Thursday morning.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe and her husband, Richard, who mounted a worldwide publicity campaign to free his wife, are now staying in a safe house with their seven-year-old daughter, Gabriella, to give the family who have spent so many years apart some privacy and downtime before they return home to north London. » | Jessica Elgot, Chief political correspondent | Friday, March 18, 2022
Verwandt.
