Jailed Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s husband has warned Iran is “close to war” with the West as he prepares to meet Boris Johnson today.
Richard Ratcliffe warned the situation is becoming “volatile and angry” in the country after the killing of general Qasem Soleimani.
Mr Ratcliffe has been granted a long-awaited meeting with the Prime Minister today in No10 as he re-doubles pressure to free his wife, who has been detained since 2016.
He is expected to ask Mr Johnson – who he has previously criticised over his handling of the charity worker’s case – to take a personal interest in the case and treat it as “a priority”.
Today he told Sky News: “The context is changing. The past couple of weeks we’ve been quite close to war.”
(Image: BBC)
He added: “The situation is so fundamentally volatile, so fundamentally angry, that actually either we look to de-escalate it in really clear ways or we prepare for the worst.
“My sense from talking to the Foreign Office is they would like to de-escalate. The Prime Minister himself talked about wouldn’t it be great if there was a Trump deal.
“I think that means then moving forwards and really trying to find ways to improve relations.”
Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a 40-year-old dual national mother from London, is serving a five-year sentence after being arrested during a holiday with her daughter and accused of spying.
Her family and the UK Government have always maintained her innocence and she has been given diplomatic protection by the Foreign Office.
Diplomatic protection is a little-used mechanism the Government can use to attempt to help individuals it believes have been wronged by another state.
It raises Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s treatment by Iran to become a formal state issue and recognises that the legal proceedings brought against her failed to meet international standards.
Mr Ratcliffe said his wife had been approached “in a dark corner” and told to admit to being a spy – something she, her family and the UK have always flatly denied.
Mr Johnson has been persistently criticised for wrongly claiming, when he was foreign secretary, that she was training journalists at the time of her arrest.
(Image: Peter Summers)
Four days later she was summoned to an unscheduled court hearing during which Mr Johnson’s comments were cited as proof she was engaged in “propaganda against the regime”.
Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe is among as many as five people with dual British-Iranian nationality, or with UK connections, believed to be in prison in Iran.
There are some hopes that diplomatic tensions could ease between London and Tehran if a long-running £400 million dispute is settled in the Court of Appeal this week.
Iran’s ambassador to the UK, Hamid Baeidinejad, tweeted that if a portion of the debt is assigned to Tehran then it will mean “the legal process of the case is coming to an end and there will be no excuse for default” from the Government.
The sum has been outstanding since pre-revolutionary Iran paid the UK for 1,500 Chieftain tanks in the 1970s.
The deal was cancelled after the Shah of Iran was deposed in 1979, but Britain has refused to heed Iran’s demands to hand back the money.
