Letter from ex-PM about jailed British-Iranian woman 'proves government links'

Tehran’s prosecutor general has said that a letter from David Cameron pleading for the release of a British-Iranian woman serving a five-year jail term in Iran on charges relating to national security was “confirmation that she had links with the UK government”.

In his first explicit comments spelling out reasons for Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s arrest in April 2016, Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi said on Tuesday that her arrest was important to the British establishment.

Dolatabadi’s comments suggest that Iran is suspicious of British attempts to secure Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s release. They come after Theresa May raised her case with the Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, on the sidelines of the UN general assembly last month.

Dolatabadi added that Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s work training journalists at the BBC was behind her conviction, saying that she ran an online course that trained participants in encryption. The BBC’s Persian service is loathed by the Iranian establishment, which considers it a subversive arm of British intelligence service MI6.

“Her husband is British and she herself has a dual citizenship and has been collaborating with that country’s government,” Dolatabadi said, according to the semi-official Fars news agency.

“She ran a BBC Persian online journalism course which was aimed at recruiting and training people to spread propaganda against Iran.

“The training included how to use anonymous emails, how to create complex and long passwords as well as how to use encryption software.”

The Iranian Revolutionary Guards, the elite forces responsible for Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s arrest, had previously accused her of orchestrating a “soft overthrow” of the Islamic Republic, but judicial authorities had not said explicitly why she was kept behind bars.

Dolatabadi’s comments indicate that Zaghari-Ratcliffe is a victim of the Iranian establishment’s animosity towards the BBC. She worked for BBC Media Action between February 2009 and October 2010 before moving to Thomson Reuters Foundation, the news agency’s charitable arm, as a project manager.

Caroline Nursey, executive director of BBC Media Action, has said that Zaghari-Ratcliffe worked briefly for the organisation in a junior administrative role, but Tehran’s objection shows that it is under the impression that she played a bigger role. Nursey has called the claim that her work there constituted an attempt to overthrow the Iranian regime “ridiculous”.

It emerged last week that Iranian authorities hacked into Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s private email, finding a photo that allegedly shows her demonstrating outside the Iranian embassy in London. Her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, said that the authorities have since reopened her case, and are now alleging new charges that may lead to an additional 16 years in prison. Iran’s embassy in London has denied that she is facing a further term in prison, saying that the accusations have not been confirmed and can be appealed.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who has been in jail for 18 months, was due to become eligible for early release next month but the new trial means she will remain behind bars.

She was arrested in April 2016 when she and her young daughter, Gabriella, were about to return to the UK after a family visit to Iran. Since then she has spent most of her time in Tehran’s Evin prison while Gabriella, now three, has been in the care of her mother’s Iranian family, who are only able to visit her during regular prison visits.

BBC Persian staff have been victims of a campaign of intimidation and smears orchestrated by Iranian authorities in recent years. In August, in the latest crackdown against the corporation’s Iranian employees, it emerged that Iran had imposed an asset freeze on more than 150 BBC Persian journalists and former contributors. BBC Persian’s Iranian employees, who are mostly based in London, are not able to visit their families in Iran for fear of reprisal – a few who have visited have faced serious problems in coming back.