Relatives of two Iranian-British men sentenced to prison in Iran on charges they have always denied have expressed their joy at finally reuniting with them in the UK.
“Happiness in a picture,” Elika Ashoori tweeted, posting a picture of her father Anoosheh Ashoori, 67, and Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, 43, smiling and surrounded by their loved ones at the Royal Air Force base from Brize Norton, in south-west England, where these two Iranian-Britons arrived in the early hours of Thursday morning.
Anoosheh Ashoori, a retired engineer, was arrested in August 2017 while visiting his mother and sentenced to 10 years in prison for spying for Israel.
An employee of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the eponymous news agency, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was arrested in April 2016 after visiting her family with her 22-month-old daughter. Accused of plotting to overthrow the Islamic Republic, she was first sentenced to five years in prison.
London announced their release on Wednesday, while indicating at the same time that it had settled an old debt of 394 million pounds (470 million euros) with Tehran, without establishing a link between the two cases.
Gabriella, 7, was reunited with her mother Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe whom she hadn’t had for over two years.
“She slept in the bed between them last night,” her aunt Rebecca Ratcliffe told Good Morning Britain on Thursday. “I think it’s a really special moment for the three of them”, stressing that the little girl had “not had a childhood with both parents”.
After her mother’s arrest in Tehran in 2016, Gabriella initially lived with her maternal family in Iran before joining her father in the UK in October 2019.
Rebecca Ratcliffe compared their reunion to “Christmas morning when you’re waiting for Santa Claus, and Santa Claus finally arrives.”
“I believe they are going to be in a house or accommodation provided by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for a few days. And then we hope to see them at the weekend,” Nazanin Zaghari’s father-in-law told the BBC. Ratcliffe, John Ratcliffe. He said he was “enormously proud” of his son who campaigned tirelessly for six years, going as far as hunger strike, to free his wife.
Foreign Secretary James Cleverly told SkyNews that a change of government in Iran had “certainly helped” advance “incredibly difficult” negotiations.
He said the government would continue to work for the departure from Iran of Morad Tahbaz, an Iranian-American also with British nationality, sentenced to 10 years in prison for “conspiracy with America” and who benefited on Wednesday from conditional release.