An Iranian court has sentenced British-Iranian aid worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe to a one-year jail term, her lawyer Hojjat Kermani told Emtedad news website on Monday.
‘Nazanin Zaghari was sentenced to one year in prison and one year ban from leaving the country on charges of propaganda against the Islamic Republic,’ Hojjat Kermani told the website.
He added that she has not yet been summoned to prison and that he plans to appeal the sentence.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe was released from house arrest in mid-March, at the end of a five-year prison sentence, but she was ordered to stay in the country to attend court on another charge.
An Iranian Revolutionary court has sentenced British-Iranian aid worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe to a one-year jail term and she is banned from leaving the country for a year
Kermani said the charges relate to a protest in London 12 years and for giving an interview to the BBC Persian Service, the BBC reported.
The case was heard in the Revolutionary Court, in front of the same judge who conducted Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s earlier hearings.
Her husband also confirmed the sentence to the BBC, saying he thought the conviction was ‘clearly a negotiating tactic’ by the Iranian authorities to gain leverage in talks to revive the nuclear deal.
Boris Johnson said that the Government will be ‘working very hard’ to secure Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s release.
The Prime Minister told reporters during a visit to Wrexham: ‘Obviously we will have to study the detail of what the Iranian authorities are saying.
‘I don’t think it is right at all that Nazanin should be sentenced to any more time in jail.
‘I think it is wrong that she is there in the first place and we will be working very hard to secure her release from Iran, her ability to return to her family here in the UK, just as we work for all our dual national cases in Iran.
‘The Government will not stop, we will redouble our efforts, and we are working with our American friends on this issue as well.’
Mr Ratcliffe, an accountant from West Hampstead, North-West London, said he was trying to shield the couple’s daughter, Gabriella,now six, from the stress he and his wife have suffered
Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a project manager with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, was arrested at a Tehran airport in April 2016 and later convicted of plotting to overthrow the clerical establishment.
She was held for years in the notorious Evin prison, where she was interrogated while blindfolded.
In a video interview with independent investigators in mid-March, Zaghari-Ratcliffe described five years of ‘traumatising’ torture at the hands of Iranian authorities.
The 43-year-old revealed she was threatened with execution and the torture of her family.
She was also chained and forced to wear a blindfold in prison where she suffered sensory and sleep deprivation.
The British-Iranian aid worker, from North London, was interrogated for up to nine hours at a time in solitary confinement.
She was bombarded with bright lights and blaring TVs to prevent her sleeping.
In the investigators’ report, seen by the BBC, she is quoted as saying officials threatened to take away her daughter Gabriella, now six, who was with relatives at the time
In the investigators’ report, seen by the BBC, she is quoted as saying officials threatened to take away her daughter Gabriella, now six, who was with relatives at the time.
She said they told her that her British husband Richard ‘was a spy, that he had already left me, that he was lying to me, that he worked for the British intelligence service.
‘They said he was unfaithful. They said he was not an accountant and that he had always been lying to me. They told me I had been fired from my job.’
She told investigators she was confined to a 6ft by 5ft cell during solitary confinement.
She said: ‘The light was left on all the time. There was only a dirty mat on the floor with a thin blanket to sleep on. There were times I could not breathe.’
In 2018 she spent a week in a psychiatric hospital with her hands and feet chained to the bed. In jail her hair began to fall out and she was too weak to climb up to the top bunk in a ward where she was being held.
As a result of the report, which was commissioned by human rights charity Redress, she was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and obsessive compulsive disorder.
Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe was arrested at a Tehran airport in April 2016 and later convicted of plotting to overthrow the clerical establishment. Pictured: Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani